


did you ever stop to love me

by screamlet



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: 2017-2018 NHL Season, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Internalized Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-17
Updated: 2019-03-17
Packaged: 2019-11-23 00:22:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18144179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/pseuds/screamlet
Summary: A writer from Alex's past outs him in an essay. What's a guy to do but marry his former best friend?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> \+ based on a prompt from thesinbin: _Ovi gets outed and Russia flips a shit; and in order to protect him both in the media and from any potential backlash by the Russian gov't through a Swedish citizenship - Nicky marries him. Thing is, Nicky's been in love with Ovi for years. And Ovi's been in love with him just as long._ ([link](https://thesinbin.dreamwidth.org/3790.html?replyto=4932046))  
> \+ i wrote this in fall 2017, then shelved it for a year and a half. AS SUCH, this is canon divergence from november 2017 onward, because who tf knew they would actually win the cup last year.  
> \+ a happy ending, i promise.

In Yasha’s defense, he never wrote the words, _Alex Ovechkin was my boyfriend_.

Yasha was _Jake_ now, _Jake Pasternak_ , a writer who appeared in the magazines Alex subscribed to in print so he had something to do on his one thousand flights a year besides listen to Kuzya accuse him of cheating at cards and Dima tell him about friends of Varvara’s.

Yasha had published a book of poems that Alex had read four times now: once to see what his old friend had written; once to figure out if his old friend was actually a good writer; once because the bastard was actually a fucking evocative writer that could bring back the smell of cold and Moscow to Alex’s senses; and once because he was pretty sure the boy in the poems was Alex himself. He was very sure the boy in his most recent essay-poem was Alex himself.

 

_I am thirty-two years old; my mother asks from my memories how I can still love this boy and who we used to be. How much longer can I wait for him outside the rink across town? How can I live my only life in a hundred ancient side streets where no one would think to look for us?_

_Yasha, my mother would say, if she could see me now, if she could speak to me. Yasha, he doesn’t even have the same smile you once knew. Yasha, you will never make his teeth perfect again. Yasha, you can only make yourself. Yasha, you can only save yourself_.

 

Alex returned to the plane, to the flight he was on with his team, to his window seat. Alex returned to the moment, where Kuzya was staring at him, a firm hand on his shoulder. Alex blinked twice, three times to clear the sudden watery irritation in his eyes. He looked around and realized it wasn’t darker on the flight—it was just Nicky and his barrel chest and his icy stare casting a shadow over their seats as he stood in the aisle of the plane.

“What are you reading?” Nicky asked.

“Nothing,” Alex lied. “Something Russian.”

Nicky held out his hand for the magazine.

“I’m not done,” Alex said, folding up the magazine into tight, tight folds and cramming it into the far side of his seat.

“You have an interesting way of reading,” Kuzya said. “I’m not as stupid as I look.”

“If you were smart, you would mind your business,” Alex snapped in Russian. He looked at Nicky, too, because if Nicky remembered anything about their time together in Moscow, all those years ago, it was how often Alex snapped that very phrase at their nosy fucking teammates.

Nicky’s stare lingered on Alex for a moment longer, and then he shrugged and moved back to his seat. The three of them, Alex and Kuzya and Dima, watched him go, and then Dima leaned forward to Kuzya with his tablet open to the article Alex had tried to hide.

Dima and Kuzya didn’t need to read the piece in the American magazine, not when they could look at the photograph, one that looked like a hundred others they had seen when visiting Alex’s family in Moscow, the gallery of Ovechkin memorabilia used to embarrass Alex whenever he introduced his friends. Dima zoomed in on the faded color photo of a few teenaged boys dressed in their late 90s-hangover worst, bad haircuts and spots and ragged oversized jeans. _The author (far left) and friends, Moscow, 2001_. It was a cute photo, especially Yasha and the boy who had his arms wrapped around Yasha. The boy who pressed their cheeks together and pursed his lips into a kiss, his lips touching the corner of Yasha’s grinning mouth. Alex remembered the warmth of Yasha’s mouth, how bold he was in front of their friend’s new digital camera—how much he wanted to hold Yasha, how much he wanted to be _seen_.

Kuzya looked at the photo on the tablet, then glanced back at Alex. “That’s some ugly haircut on that kid, whoever he is.”

At the front of the plane, Tom kneeled up on his seat, a six-and-a-half-foot tall child staring at him over the rows. “Ovi, you’re in the fucking _New Yorker_? In some dude’s _memoir_? Twitter’s blowing up about it.”

Alex checked his phone, where he had several furious texts and emails from his agents in Moscow and in America. He had one text from Ted fucking Leonsis that just said, _Hi Alex! Call me! :)_ because the unkindest thing Ted Leonsis had ever said to Alex’s face was _I’m still proud of you, and I always will be_.

When they landed, he called Ted first. If the billionaire still liked him, maybe things would be okay.

*

Alex’s agent in Moscow had an interesting take on the situation, a strategy distilled from several different sources that his agent didn’t need to name in the conference call with everyone on Alex’s management team and the Capitals’ management team. The NHL had come very close to begging on their hands and knees to be allowed on the call, but Ted had told them, very gently, that he would get back to them.

Alex was sitting at the desk in his hotel room, taking notes on what people said and recording the whole thing with Nicky’s phone, because he wasn’t a fucking idiot and Nicky—

Even if he and Nicky had drifted apart in recent years, he was still Nicky. He was still his center, his A; he was still the smartest person Alex knew. He was still the person Alex could turn to, ten years ago and ten years from now, a hundred years from now, even tonight, when Alex couldn’t see himself out of this mess. Nicky could think of something. Nicky would help.

“Don’t lie about it,” said Alex’s Russian agent. “Don’t overreact, don’t be too sensitive, don’t make fun of this—this _insanity_. We will write a little statement that says, haha, yes, we were good friends, but that was a long time ago and if he thinks it makes for a funny little story in America, then he can have it. Remember how you laughed off that hit to the knee? Just like that. And then you go back to living your life: lots of winning, lots of women. This is the plan, Sasha.”

Alex muted his end of the line and choked on nothing at all. He turned in his seat and hid his face from Nicky, because Nicky couldn’t see him like this. Nicky had seen him choke enough times in their lives and this—this was the one time he could do what was asked of him. He could do this. He could start going out again. He could try, even, to find a woman who—who—there had to be someone out there, someone in the world for him.

No, some _woman_ in the world. _She_ would feel right in _his_ arms, _she_ would be beautiful as women were beautiful, _she_ —

Nicky snatched Alex’s phone out of his hands and unmuted it.

“This is Backy,” Nicky said. “This is Nicklas Backstrom. Alex can’t do that. We’re engaged. We’re engaged to be married. We have been in a relationship since we played together in Moscow. I only proposed this past February during our bye week. We have plans to marry next summer in Sweden. I love him and you won’t do this to him. You can call us back when your plan isn’t written by a shithead who wants us dead.”

Nicky ended the call, then threw the phone against the wall. His perfect eye and his perfect aim had the glass iPhone screen smash directly into the raised box of the thermostat. The thermostat burst off the wall and Alex’s phone was shattered.

“Backy,” Alex whispered. “Nicky, what did you do?”

*

Capitals’ management was flying out to meet them in their next road trip city. Before the big guns landed, Nicky decided to gather the team in a private room at some breakfast restaurant to tell them about their years-long relationship and months-long engagement.

Alex and Nicky were sitting together at the table, Alex at the head and Nicky to his right. Nicky usually sat at the far end away from Alex, a habit they subconsciously formed so all their seniority and wisdom could spread out as the team around them became younger.

That was how Alex remembered it. Nicky had picked up Greenie and Jojo and Andre one day and gone to the other end of the table and never come back. Carly followed, too, of course. He assumed it was a leadership thing. It made sense the way Nicky always made sense.

“Management is flying out to talk to me and Alex,” Nicky said as he stood up from his seat. He looked down at Alex, who took that as a cue to stand up at his seat as well, the better for the two of them to be a united front for the team. “After that essay, we decided it was time to tell people outside of our families about our relationship and our engagement.”

The table greeted this news with complete silence. Some of them exchanged looks across the table and to the guys on either side of them before looking back to Alex and Nicky.

“Like… _engaged_ engaged?” Osh asked. “Like… _married_?”

Andre asked something in Swedish, a blatant _what the fuck_ that was echoed around the table.

“You guys don’t even sit next to each other on the plane,” Tom said. “You don’t even have rings!”

Nicky grabbed Alex’s hand roughly—he didn’t link their fingers, just clutched him hard. Alex hysterically wondered if this was the kind of care Nicky took in getting himself off. Was this the gentle loving death grip that would cherish him for years to come?

“I’m sorry, _Tom_ ,” Nicky said. “How much jewelry is enough jewelry for you? Alex only has six gold chains wrapped around his neck every day, we only have matching gold numbers—”

“Those are from a million years ago,” Carly countered. “You guys haven’t—”

“We haven’t what?” Nicky asked.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Andre asked. “How long have you been engaged?”

“Since the bye week,” Nicky said.

“The bye week? The last bye week?” Andre asked. “You didn’t tell us? It’s been months and you didn’t tell us? When were you going to tell us?”

“We’re telling you now,” Nicky said.

“Because you have to!” Osh interrupted. “Because the internet and everyone and their mom won’t shut the fuck up about some old picture and some fucking guy’s essay, and now all of a sudden you’re _engaged_? When were you going to tell us?”

“You don’t even talk anymore except on the ice,” Carly said. “We thought something had fucking _happened_ but it’s not like either of you would ever answer a direct fucking question—”

“Unless the press put a gun to their heads like they just did,” Osh finished.

Alex looked at the people on his left, Kuzya and Dima, who were staring at him and only him expectantly. They had been his rookies, now his friends, and they looked furious with him.

“It’s complicated,” Alex finally said, in English, looking at Kuzya and Dima. “You’re right. We haven’t been honest and we—we didn’t want to say anything because it’s been hard. It’s been so hard, trying to be together and keep it a secret.”

“You didn’t have to keep it a secret!” Osh yelled at them.

“Not from us,” Holtz added in his softest, firmest voice.

“Yes I had to!” Alex yelled back. “My secrets are not your business except now, when everyone makes it their business and _insists_ it’s their business! I wanted none of this. I didn’t want this, because when could I be married to a man? Never! So I hide. If I had what I wanted, we—”

Alex swallowed and dug his smallest, frailest daydream out from the place he only visited on nights when he couldn’t sleep alone. “We get married at fifty. Standing by a lake I used to visit when I was growing up, and that we—me and Nicky—used to visit on vacation when we went out into the country. No one would be there, just us. We’d kiss and be married and go home to our dogs and live our fucking lives, and no one would bother us again. It’s no one’s business how I want to live, what I call Nicky. He’s Nicky, he’s mine, and that’s the end of it.”

Alex took Nicky’s hand and adjusted their grip, linking their fingers together. Nicky didn’t move for a long moment, but then squeezed gently and relaxed his hand. It was so much better than the bone-crushing squeeze. Alex could breathe again.

“So we don’t have rings. Fuck you. We didn’t need them until now, when everyone said we had to have them or—or what we had wasn’t real.”

The boys looked properly ashamed. Alex almost felt ashamed for lying to them so well.

“It hasn’t been easy,” Nicky said. “You’re right. I don’t sit with him. It’s easier for me if I sit far away. It’s easier if we only talk hockey when we have to play hockey. It’s easier if we—if we keep work at work, and home at home.”

“You didn’t have to tell us,” Tom said. “But you _could_ have told us. We would understand.”

“Did Greenie know?” Carly asked.

Nicky didn’t answer. Alex didn’t answer.

“I thought he was your best friend,” Carly pressed at Nicky. “Is it—did he say shit to you? Did he tell you not to tell us? Did he do something?”

“Greenie knew about me, but not that I was with Alex,” Nicky finally said. “He knew I was with someone, but I never said. _He_ didn’t ask.”

“That’s fucked up and you know it,” Carly said. “Even if you and me weren’t family, I thought _you guys_ were family, you and Greenie.” Carly, who loved to laugh, looked disgusted at them, especially Nicky.

Nicky gripped Alex’s hand tighter.

“You didn’t tell Latts either,” Tom said. “You let him come out to us and made him think he was alone. That he was crazy to think he could find someone in this fucking sport who might want what he wants, _what you have_. You let him think he was alone.”

“That’s bullshit,” Kuzya interrupted, leaning forward to look at Tom. “You know why Ovi couldn’t say shit. You don’t know how long Ovi lived like that, too.”

“But Latts didn’t have to!” Tom yelled back. “We still talk, he still tells me about guys he meets. With every guy he says, _maybe this is the one, but why should I think that, right, it hasn’t happened yet_ , and he—if he knew it was fucking _possible_ —”

“We’re done,” Nicky announced. “We told you, now you know. You can be okay, or we can stand here and talk about how we should have lived differently to make you happy.” Nicky shrugged and led Alex out of the room, out of the restaurant, into a cab that took them back to the hotel so Alex could take a hot shower and Nicky could start making plans.

*

They issued a joint statement and declined all interview requests.

The beat reporters asked about their relationship after every game, but Nicky and Alex offered crooked half smiles in response. They each drawled a hundred variations of, “Come on, let’s stick to hockey,” and would steadfastly stick to hockey talk and only hockey talk. They stared down phones and recorders and cameras until the reporters changed the subject or left them alone.  

The boys were allowed to say a little more, a whole sentence along the lines of, “We’ve always known and we’ve always supported them.”

They hired a lawyer to handle Alex’s application for Swedish citizenship.

They sat at Alex’s house with their laptops and sorted through more than a decade of photos, pulling out the ones where they were together to compile proof of their long-standing connection.

“You could have visited me,” Nicky laughed dryly, closing another month of summer photos. “All these years, you never visited me in Sweden.”

“You never visited me in Russia,” Alex said. “Except during the lockout.”

“You begged me to come with you.”

“I asked.”

“You called me every day.”

“Because I wanted you to come to Russia,” Alex said. “Did you want me to come to Sweden? Did you want me there?”

Nicky scrolled through his photos silently for a long time before he answered.

“I didn’t think you would come,” Nicky said. “So I didn’t ask.”

Alex nodded. He understood that, maybe too well. He remembered how much vodka it took to call Nicky every night to beg him to come to Russia, how much more it took to share an apartment with him in Moscow and retreat to his own bedroom every night, every want unsaid.

“We’re going to be married,” Alex said. “You have to ask me for things. You have to tell me what you need. We can’t do this guessing at what we want.”

“Are you going to tell me things?” Nicky asked. “Are you going to tell me about Jake, or Yasha, or whatever the fuck his name is? Were there others or just him?”

Nicky hadn’t touched him in a photo since the lockout. They came back from Moscow and suddenly Nicky was at the edges of their group photos, or in a different group photo all together. Nicky at the end of the table. Nicky not looking at Alex. Nicky laughing with his boys, not _their_ boys. It was an old ache that flared up now after all these years Nicky had put this space between them. _Now_ , just as Alex had stopped hurting, Nicky had thrown himself at Alex, near Alex, _on_ Alex, and Alex was supposed to be pleased by this development? That whatever repulsed Nicky before was suddenly unimportant now?

“Did you even do anything with him?” Nicky asked.

“Yes, I’m gay,” Alex said. “I’ve tried to be with women and it’s—it was never easy. It never felt right.”

“That’s not what I asked, but thank you for telling me. I asked about the writer, since at some point, we will probably have to talk about the writer.”

“The writer doesn’t matter,” Alex snapped. “I told you what you need to know.”

They silently scrolled through more pictures, now from recent seasons. They never went to the same parties, the same weddings, the same vacations. They weren’t even _together_ during the bye week, the one where Nicky proposed, supposedly; they were on different islands in the Caribbean 50 miles apart.

Alex imagined Nicky would concoct a wonderful story about sneaking over to Alex’s resort after taking a few mandatory photos at his “real” vacation. He would cover for them when immigration began to ask questions, like why weren’t there receipts for his flights to Alex, or photos, or any kind of proof? For exactly this reason, Nicky would say, so that if they were ever caught, there would be no proof. It was more exciting that way, Nicky would say, with absolutely no excitement behind his eyes.

How could Nicky propose without a ring?

“Aren’t you going to ask me?” Nicky asked.

“Ask you what?”

“I sleep with people, but I only fall in love with men.”

“Oh,” Alex said.

“You never ask,” Nicky said. “You never fucking ask.”

*

Alex had money, so Alex summoned a jeweler to his house so he and Nicky could pick out engagement tokens. Rings, pendants, chains, bracelets, anything to bring truth to the lie. The jeweler was opening cases on Alex’s massive dining room table while Nicky hunted in the fridge for something to eat.

“He likes diamonds,” Alex said with absolutely no evidence of that fact except that he had once gifted Nicky a watch with some diamonds on the face and Nicky still wore it, sometimes.

Once. Twice. Wait, how many watches had he gifted Nicky? How many watches had Nicky just _accepted_ without pointing out _by the way, you incredibly obvious homosexual, this is the third watch you’ve tried to use to claim me, could you CALM DOWN?_

“What’s his birthstone?” Alex asked. “What’s mine?”

“Topaz and citrine. September is sapphire.”

Nicky returned, sipping a beer and staring both Alex and the jeweler down.

“I don’t like my birthstone,” Nicky said.

“Orange is a terrible color on you,” Alex agreed.

“Topaz comes in many colors,” the jeweler said. The jeweler was Russian; he had loved Alex’s business and his awful, expensive taste until Alex had called and said he wanted to see a selection of men’s engagement jewelry. The jeweler must have lived in a cave; he actually asked, _Haha, did you go to someone else for the lady’s ring? I’ll try not to be too upset!_

The silence was deafening after Alex explained his new situation, but clearly the jeweler wasn’t too upset to gouge Alex in any way he could.

“I don’t know what I want,” Nicky said, interrupting Alex’s thoughts. “I don’t wear a lot of jewelry.”

“Then why am I here?” the jeweler asked Alex.

Alex took a sharp breath and looked at Nicky. “What are your traditions? Do you want an engagement ring? Just a wedding ring? We can pick them both now. You can pick mine.”

“I just said—”

“I know what you said, but I want you to wear something that I gave you,” Alex said. “And I want to wear something that you gave me. You don’t have to pay, just—just pick something, Nicky. Give me something.”

Nicky stared at Alex, then approached the table and began to look at the spread of jewelry.

“In Sweden, we do three rings,” Nicky finally said without looking up. “Engagement, marriage, children. They’re usually thin, simple, so you wear all three at once.”

“I have thin, but not simple,” the jeweler said, leaning over Nicky and pulling out single rings. “You can choose one now for the engagement, then a similar style for the other two. Unless you—do you want all three now?”

“No,” Nicky said. “No, I—one at a time. I think.”

“Can do different metals,” Alex said. “No, don’t do that, I hate that.”

“Okay,” Nicky laughed. “I can’t tell, so.”

Nicky looked at Alex and motioned to the spread. “What do you want your engagement ring to look like? Lots of diamonds? One big diamond?”

“I don’t know,” Alex admitted. “Are there any you like?”

“Any I like for you?” Nicky asked.

Nicky looked at him, his face open, all of him waiting for a response. In asking that simple question, a simple _yes_ or _no_ , Nicky had no idea that around Alex’s heart was wrapped a fist. Other people, surely, had regular hearts that opened and closed, relaxed and contracted, that filled a wide space in their chest and let them breathe and live and walk around like nothing was wrong. When Alex was young—when Yasha sat next to him to whisper something, when they jostled each other’s shoulders walking down the street or playing ball, when their hands and fingers brushed as they walked together, when they’d tackle each other to be rough, to touch each other—Alex could feel a hand closing tight around his heart at moments like these.

It started with Yasha, who he was close with until he left for Washington. All these years, it always came back to Yasha, the way Yasha would come to him and offer himself to Alex, and Alex never had to breathe a word. Not that he could, because the fist around his heart wouldn’t let him. If he said one word, it would be over. He could kiss, he could hold, he could come with a quiet gasp, every inch of him trembling, but saying a word of what he wanted? The fist would close. He would die. He would _die_.

Alex took a deep breath and brought himself to nod. Nicky looked at him again, and asked him seriously, “If I pick something, would you actually like it?” He smiled a little. “I think I have bad taste.”

“You don’t wear jewelry, how could you have bad taste?” Alex asked.

Nicky looked at the spread some more, then picked up a band and held it out to Alex. “Simple, so you could wear a wedding ring, too, but—is this enough diamonds? Is it shiny enough?”

The band was a simple platinum, diamonds all along the top. Alex held it and could see it on his hand, a thick plain platinum band on top for his wedding band, another diamond ring on top for—

“I like it,” Alex said, hoping no one noticed that holding a ring had almost carried him away from their slipshod fucking insane idea of reality. “I like it for me.” He leaned forward and found a thick band, similar to what he imagined. “And this for the wedding band. What do you think?”

“I like it,” Nicky said. “If I want the same wedding band for me—”

“Yes,” Alex said. “You should.”

Nicky slipped it on and frowned a little. “Maybe a little thinner. My hands aren’t—”

Alex laughed. “Your hands are wonderful.”

Nicky blushed a bright, hot red. Alex couldn’t believe he had just said what he said, and said it in front of the jeweler, who busied himself looking among the rings for the same band but thinner. He held it out to Nicky and said, in an impatient voice, “Here. See if this is better.”

It did look better. Nicky nodded and they set the bands aside.

“Now an engagement ring for you,” Alex said.

“Pick one for me.”

“What do you like?”

“I don’t know,” Nicky said. “The only jewelry I have are things you gave me. I think you know me better than I know myself.”

It was the same thought Alex hadn’t voiced but Nicky had picked up on earlier. How could people not see how smart Nicky was, how easily he read every situation? How could they not appreciate his goodness, his—whatever. Rings. He would have to pick a ring. Something for Nicky to wear that would tell people someone cared for him.

“What about this one?” Alex asked.

“Titanium?” the jeweler asked. “Good eye.”

It was a band with two lines engraved all around, one at the top and one at the bottom, and a diamond set in the center. Alex picked it up and handed it to Nicky. “It’s light,” Alex said. “Like your chain.”

Nicky reached up and touched the thin chain around his neck. He looked at the ring again and nodded. “I like this one,” Nicky said.

“Do you want anything else?” Alex asked as the jeweler fitted Nicky to find his ring size. “A new chain? Pendant? I—we can give each other these things as gifts now. For birthdays, anniversaries—”

“Oh god, every birthday?” Nicky asked.

“No!” Alex said. “Just—whenever. Whenever you like, Nicky. Whatever you want.”

Any hint of tentative joy on Nicky’s face suddenly disappeared, as if Alex had held him by the shoulders and forced him to stare down the barrel of choosing diamonds several times a year, of walking around like a jangling cat covered in chains or, worst of all, morphing into whatever he saw when he looked at Alex.

“Never mind,” Alex said. “Forget I said it.”

“No, it’s—”

They stood there in silence together, Nicky and Alex and the jeweler, whose eyes kept flicking from one to the other, waiting to see what either or both of them would do. In the end, neither of them said anything.

“If there’s nothing else,” the jeweler said. He wrote out an old fashioned paper receipt, ripped off the top, and handed it to Alex. “All the rings will be adjusted and available for you by the end of next week.”

Alex thanked him. Nicky wandered off into Alex’s house, biding his time until the jeweler was packed and gone and he could go home, too.

*

In Arizona, they left the locker room after the game to find Latts. Latts went the whole game without ending up in the box, a fucking miracle from what Tom said, what Alex remembered.

Alex and Nicky walked into the home team’s locker room and everyone fell silent. Latts was standing, dressed like he was ready to run while the rest of his team was still in the showers.

“Come on,” Alex said to him.

Latts clearly didn’t want to follow them, but he had to support his old team in front of his new team. One of the guys clutched his arm as he left, some silent back and forth between them.

“You good?” this teammate finally asked Latta.

“Yeah, we’re good,” Latts said, and the teammate gently let him go. Latts got a clap on the shoulder and a nod in return as he turned back to Alex and Nicky and followed them out.

Latts led them down some corridor and adjusted the bag across chest. “So, congrats on, you know, everything.”

“Listen,” Alex said, putting two hands firmly on Mike’s shoulders. “We love you. But not five million dollars’ lost endorsements love you. Okay?”

“Okay, seriously, _fuck you guys_ ,” Latts replied. He pushed Alex’s hands off him and held his hands up. “I didn’t ask for _shit_ , I don’t know what the fuck Tom told you but I don’t fucking care, okay? I don’t care. I don’t need anything from you anymore.”

Alex didn’t know what he could say to fix this. Nicky reached out and wrapped a hand around Alex’s forearm.

“We know,” Nicky said. “We’re sorry. That’s all we wanted to say.”

“Good,” Latts said. “Thanks for the apology. Go fuck yourselves.”

“Mikey, please,” Alex pleaded, the stupid childish nickname that Latts hated but tolerated from them because it was them. “You don’t know. You—I couldn’t _say_.”

“I know,” Latts said. “You couldn’t. You couldn’t tell anyone, because if you told _me_ , well. You fucking know me. Part of the fucking queer police, running off to tell the next dude whose dick I wanted to suck that he wouldn’t _believe_ who in the NHL was fucking each other.”

“It wasn’t that,” Alex said.

“No, it wasn’t, but it might as well been,” Latts said. “Fuck you both. Enjoy each other.”

He stalked away, then turned back to look at them.

“All I needed to know,” he began, “All I needed to hear was that I wasn’t crazy, to be in this league and to play this sport and to love men. I’m old enough now that it doesn’t matter and I don’t care what people think, that I’ll fuck who I want and love who I want, but man. God help the next kid in your locker room who says, _am I crazy to wish that someone will love me like I want them to? Is that ever going to happen for me?_ And there you were, laughing at me for years. Fuck you.”

The Capitals flew to Vegas the same night. Tom and Andre spent the night furiously texting. No one sat next to Nicky or Alex on the plane, so Alex left his row and plopped next to Nicky.

“What do you want for Christmas?” Alex asked, because it was December 22.

“This,” Nicky said.

Icy silence from their teammates, perfect.

“Anything better? Anything I can buy?”

Nicky sighed and leaned back in his seat. “It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

Alex sat back, too, and sighed with him.

“The Nylanders hate me,” Nicky said. “William especially. Michael understands, said he would talk to him and Alex.”

“He understands?” Alex asked.

“Michael’s old,” Nicky said. “Willy was eleven or twelve when marriage was legalized in Sweden. They’re a big family, lots of different people raised them, not just hockey people. He doesn’t understand about keeping quiet. He knows—” Nicky stammered, tripping on some word in Swedish that Alex didn’t know. “There’s private and there’s quiet. Private isn’t private. Private—family, friends, everyone knows, but they keep it to themselves. He’s mad we kept quiet. It means we’re not family or friends. He doesn’t understand. Latts is younger than us, too, but he should know better.”

Kuzya and Dima were sitting rows and rows away in the back; Alex hoped Nicky’s Russian was still decent enough for a conversation.

“We kept quiet,” Alex said, “Because we’re not together, Nicky. It’s not real. We kept quiet because we had nothing to say.”

Nicky glared at him, his expression stone-faced and icy.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Nicky asked in slow, but firm Russian. He always did that; Nicky always doubled-down with anger and fight when he was unsure of something. “It’s a lie I’m telling for you and it’s killing my life with the Nylanders. They took care of me and now I’m lying to them, and they think I’ve always lied to them.”

“You could have told them,” Alex said in Russian. “You could have told them you wanted men.”

“What men?” Nicky asked. “The ones who came to their house, my bedroom, and played video games with me for hours while their babies were upstairs? The ones who were my roommates? Did you tell George, when you lived with him and his family? No, you fucking didn’t.” Nicky sat up straight and turned his face away from Alex, but then turned back. “But you’ll have to, won’t you? Tomorrow we play in Vegas and you have to tell George to his face.”

“Fuck you,” Alex said.

“You don’t have the balls to fuck me,” Nicky hissed.

Alex left Nicky’s row and returned to his empty seat. He put on his headphones and blasted techno until they landed, until they got on the bus, until they got to their hotel.

Since their announcement, Nicky had been sleeping in Alex’s hotel rooms to keep up the pretense. Tonight, Nicky didn’t even bother. All the better for Alex to fall asleep with the TV on, curled up on one narrow slice of the bed just the way he liked.

*

George McPhee met Alex outside the locker room in Vegas. He pulled him into his arms and hugged him, and Alex buried his face in the shoulder of George’s expensive suit. When they pulled away from each other, they were both teary and embarrassed, but not upset.

“Brian called me,” he said. “Since Moscow? The lockout?”

“That’s our story,” Alex said.

“When I scouted him for the draft,” George began. “We wanted a center for you. You needed someone to hold you steady, make the most of what you did. And Backy’s just. He’s so much better with a powerhouse like you, a heart like yours.” George shook his head. “I thought it was all about the game. I never thought, you know?”

The fist around Alex’s heart, here in front of this man who gave him everything he had, including Nicky, almost loosened. These days it was clenched tight enough that Alex felt every extra rush of oxygen to the rest of his body, every extra breath he could take, when the fist around his heart loosened.

“I love him, George,” Alex whispered. He clutched George’s lapels a little and he felt—it was April 2006 again and George and Ted were telling him he would have to announce their first round pick, the Swede, and the terror of embarrassing himself with his poor English was so overwhelming. Alex was twenty years old again, telling a man he hadn’t worked for in years that he was in love with his own fiancé, something even his fiancé didn’t know.

“I really love him. I love him so much I hate him sometimes, because I only want to love him all the time and he—he makes it so hard. This life makes it so hard, I—”

“It’s all right,” George said. “You can say it now.” George put his hands on Alex’s shoulders and tried to draw Alex’s eyes up. “I’m invited to the wedding, right? At least let me buy you something nice. Does Nick like dogs yet?”

Alex choked out a laugh and shook his head. “A little better, but still scared.”

“All right, I won’t get you another dog.”

Alex left George eventually. He walked alone to the parking lot where their bus was waiting.

Nicky was waiting by the door, hands in his pockets, the picture of patience.

“Did you see George?” Alex asked.

“Before the game,” Nicky said. “It was fine. Do you know you’re crying?”

“I’m okay,” Alex said.

“Why are you crying?”

“Sometimes people cry when they’re happy, Nicky.”

“You’re happy?” Nicky asked. “About what?”

Alex gave him a look. “Happy it’s you, Nicky. Happy my future husband is someone I can yell at, and he’s still my friend. You can yell at me, too, and I’m still your friend.”

Nicky nodded. He looked abashed. “I’m sorry I—what I said on the plane.”

“You were right,” Alex said. “I don’t have the balls to fuck you.” Alex pushed the door open to the parking lot and looked Nicky right in the eyes. “Do you?”

Nicky looked stricken, so Alex gave him another moment before he left, walking to the bus, hands in his pockets. The door didn’t shut behind him, behind Nicky, for several long moments.


	2. Chapter 2

In the new year, the Swedish embassy scheduled Alex’s citizenship interview and Alex and Nicky’s interview to investigate their domestic _whatever_. Alex’s high-profile case had progressed fast mostly due to their status, money, and the total lack of proof that they had been anything but teammates for as long as they’ve known each other.

“You should be fine,” their lawyer assured them. “Nick is a citizen of good standing in Sweden and you have a long-established relationship. Romantic or not, the evidence is overwhelming that this isn’t a _whim_.”

It was a whim. It cost Alex a phone and the team a hushed-up vandalism charge for the broken thermostat.

“You were holding the infant Crown Prince of Sweden in your arms not eight months ago, Nick,” their lawyer continued. “You made a Swede the MVP at Worlds and brought home gold. You’re _fine_.”

“Yes, I know I’m fine,” Nicky said. “I’m not the one applying for citizenship.”

“Yeah, well,” said their lawyer. “It would help if Alex was willing to renounce his Russian citizenship, but he’s not, so we’ll just have to work with it.”

“Maybe it’s your lucky day,” Alex said. “Maybe Russia will take it away from me.”

“...can they do that?” Nicky asked.

Alex shrugged. “Russia can do anything it wants. Already painted over my billboards in Moscow.”

“Alex. You didn’t tell me that.”

“You didn’t tell me that either,” their lawyer said.

“You’re a lawyer, you should know,” Alex said.

“What about me?” Nicky asked in a quiet voice. “When were you going to tell me?”

“Nothing you can do about it, Nicky, so why worry?”

“I swear to god,” Nicky muttered. “You tell me because you are going to be my _husband_. What good is any of this—what good am I if I can’t protect you?”

Alex tried to breathe while Nicky’s words sank into him. “You’re protecting me now,” Alex finally said. “Don’t worry about the billboards. Nike’s still paying me for ads in Europe and Asia, just not Russia.”

“You’re _Russian_.”

“I know, Nicky.”

Nicky shifted in his chair, furious and uncomfortable. “I don’t understand why this idiot who called himself your friend would do this to you. If the writer had just kept his mouth shut—”

“You had to do this eventually,” their lawyer interrupted. “You were going to get married at some point.”

They kept quiet.

“...because you were going to retire at some point,” their lawyer continued, his crazy face swiveling towards them as if they were the stupidest people alive. “And if you weren’t working in the States, you would have had to return to your home countries, and then you couldn’t live together anymore. You would have had to marry and apply for a domestic visa. That’s your story, _right_?”

“Everyone is fucking _obsessed_ with marriage,” Alex said.

“Could you _not_ say that where the cameras and microphones can probably hear you?” asked their lawyer.

“It’s true,” Nicky said. “I don’t care who knows it. We were fine being together without being married.”

“Four years we’ve lived together,” Alex lied. “We were fine. We were happy.” A far bigger lie.

“And you honestly never thought about your future?” asked their lawyer. “Christ, have you even drawn up wills and prenuptial agreements for when you _do_ get married? Okay, I need to call your _other_ lawyers immediately, this is impossible.”

“We were busy,” Alex said. “We play a lot of hockey.”

“And you go to the beach and the clubs every summer and this other one spends two months with buff Swedish men doing sweaty stretches and throwing medicine balls—which looks terrific for fidelity, _let me tell you_.”

“Should I tell you how many buff men we have to undress for every day?” Nicky asked. “It’s a lot.”

Someone came out of the back offices to summon them in for their interviews. The three of them stood up and their lawyer led the way. He turned and flashed a _don’t fuck this up_ look over his shoulder before greeting the immigration people warmly and introducing his clients.

Nicky turned slightly and Alex reached for his outstretched hand, linking their fingers together. He squeezed Nicky’s hand and Nicky squeezed back.

*

The Swedes running the visa interviews sat across the table from Alex, Nicky, and their lawyer. The Swedes smiled widely and the one in the center clapped his hands. “Congratulations!”

Alex smiled a little at the word and nodded along with the endless words that came out of their mouths, their lawyer taking notes and asking questions with all the diligence they paid him to have.

They. Alex. Alex was paying. Nicky said he would pay him half, but Alex shrugged it off. Why would Nicky pay for his fake husband’s real immigration lawyer?

Alex, who still wasn’t listening, glanced down and saw Nicky’s hand rest on his thigh and squeeze, a quick thing that they did often enough, when words in the locker room couldn’t come. Alex reached for his hand and clutched at him, and Nicky didn’t pull away.

“Well?”

Alex looked up. He was startled and so was Nicky.

“You two look… surprised. Aren’t you pleased?” asked one of the Swedes.

“We are,” Alex said.

The panel of Swedes nodded, but there was an expectant pause in the air.

“Thank you?” Alex said.

“Yes, thank you, we’re very happy,” Nicky said.

That made the Swedes light up.

“Before you leave, we can get a photo of the two of you and your temporary visa, if you’d like,” said one of the panel. “Just so everyone knows this story will have a happy ending. Love always wins, in the end. We can bring back that #LoveWins hashtag. It’s very appropriate here.”

Alex’s chest was ready to cave into itself.

“Of course,” said their lawyer. “I don’t see why not. The boys would love it.”

Nicky turned to Alex and squeezed his hand. Alex stared at him as Nicky asked, “Is that all right?”

Alex smiled, offered a little shrug, nodded just barely. The Swedes took this for exuberance.

In one of the big corner offices, something with the Swedish flag on a pole in the corner and a national seal on the carpeted floor, Alex and Nicky stood together and held the edges of Alex’s visa. The photographer told them to smile, and then lowered the camera and gave them a coy little grin.

“You can if you want to, you know. It’d be really cute, if you kissed,” they said.

Nicky shook his head. “That’s all right.”

“Oh, come on! Are you sure?”

“That’s all right,” Alex repeated. The mood in the room deflated slightly, so Alex stepped a little closer to Nicky and rested a hand on the small of his back, their fingers still clutching the paper. The photographer brightened again, took more photos, and then they were allowed to go.

In the parking garage, their lawyer clapped them both on the back and told them working on their case was a fucking nightmare, but he was happy for them all the same. Alex climbed into the passenger seat of Nicky’s car as Nicky shook hands with the lawyer and sent him off.

Before Nicky started the car, he looked at Alex. He reached out and rested his hand on Alex’s shoulder.

“Is everything all right?”

It took several long moments for Alex to come up with sounds that weren’t screaming.

“I’m not Russian anymore,” Alex said.

“What? No, that’s not how this works. You still have your Russian passport, your Russian citizenship, but you’ll _also_ have Swedish citizenship, that’s—”

“Nicky, I’m _Swedish_ now,” Alex said. He could feel the way his lip had formed the word with a snarl at its edge. “Those _assholes_ will put a photo of me and my Swedish husband on Twitter, at the Swedish embassy, celebrating my Swedish citizenship—you think they’ll let me be Russia’s captain again? _Ever_?”

Nicky took his hand away. He put both hands on the wheel, flexing his fingers as he gripped. “Yes. I understand that, and I thought you understood that, too.”

“I did. I knew, a little. I knew it would happen, but. It’s real. It happened. Now, _right now_ , it happened. I’ll never play in the Olympics again.”

“We already—”

“Playing for Sweden is not playing for Russia!”

“Well fuck you, too,” Nicky snapped. “I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry I rushed us into this. Once your citizenship is final and we’re married, you can divorce me in three years. Maybe Russia will have changed by then.”

“Yes, they’re so good at change,” Alex scoffed.

“I’m sorry,” Nicky said, much softer this time. “I’m sorry this hurt you, but I’m not sorry I helped you. You were in trouble. I had to do something. It wasn’t as though either of us was in a rush to marry anyone.”

Alex’s eyes widened and he shoved Nicky’s shoulder. “What the _fuck_ is wrong with you?”

“What!”

“Last month we were barely friends, Nicky, and now we’re engaged! We’ll be married! To each other! What the _fuck_ came into your head?” Alex looked away. “You didn’t even give me a chance to say something when my agent talked about his plan. I could have lied, I could have found a woman. I could have _paid_ a woman, paid her thousands to look beautiful and never touch me, and you never gave me the chance, you just—you took everything from me, Nicky. I could have still had a future, a _country_ , and you—”

In the tight confines of the car, Nicky shoved Alex back, hard. “FUCK YOU,” he shouted. “You don’t remember the hotel, Ovi. You were a shitty mess and all you had to say was _yes, sure, find me a woman, that will be fine_ , and you couldn’t even _breathe_. You couldn’t hold your phone straight and you expect me to believe you could have played straight? For years? For the rest of your life?”

“Shut up, I don’t need this,” Alex stammered as he struggled with his seatbelt.

In a flash, Nicky leaned over.

Nicky grabbed Alex’s shoulders, then put his hands on Alex’s cheeks and pulled him close.

Nicky held him still and kissed him, a firm and tight-lipped thing, then—then a gentle kiss. He kissed Alex softly, taking his top lip gently between his teeth and kissing Alex. Alex stared at Nicky’s closed eyes, Nicky’s lips as he pulled away, Nicky’s soft pale hands against Alex’s cheeks. When Nicky opened his eyes, he stared at Alex and then pulled away.

“I loved you,” Nicky said quietly, before that fury under Nicky’s skin resurfaced, a bright red flush to his face. Nicky slammed his hands into the steering wheel and yelled, “FUCK, I LOVED YOU,” and then said nothing else.

It was too much—the interviews, the photos, Russia, Sweden, their future, their past, it was too much. Alex stared at the side of Nicky’s face, stony and silent, then unbuckled his seatbelt and left the car. He would walk. He would take a bus. He would take a cab or something, he would walk into the river, he would do anything but look at Nicky in the fucking face again.

*

They had a game that night, so Alex took a cab directly to Capital One Arena in the middle of the afternoon. He ate a garbage lunch, napped on one of the therapy beds, then warmed up on the ice as the team started to arrive.

Nicky must have been one of the first. Alex was out on the ice before the doors opened and Nicky came out in his pre-game shorts and knee-high socks to stare at him. He called out to him at some point, but Alex ignored him to continue skating.

When he finally returned to the room to change, the team was quiet. They seemed to be watching Alex and Nicky and keeping their own conversations quiet. At least, they were until Carly spoke up.

“You know, for an engaged couple, you two talk even less than usual,” Carly said. “Just putting that out there.”

“I didn’t ask you, Carly,” Alex replied.

“Communication’s the bedrock for a healthy partnership,” Carly continued. “You’re not gonna make it through planning the bachelor parties unless you make that your first priority.”

“No bachelor parties,” Alex said. “You want a drink so bad, I’ll buy you a bottle.”

That got some chuckles out of people, though most of them were disguised as coughs.

“No one’s business, team, just ours,” Alex announced. “Let’s mind our fucking business and win tonight.”

*

They lost.

They lost because Alex kept taking Nicky’s assists and hitting the post or hitting a fucking idiot who was blocking the shot with his idiot body, and Nicky kept missing passes to Alex. Every time their eyes met, the automatic processes that had made them so good at what they did _halted_ for the longest moment in time and space while they stared at each other, vicious and sad and their lips stinging from that kiss. Nicky had been so gentle, Alex remembered as he stared at Nicky, who waited with the puck across the ice. Why had he been so gentle? Why did Nicky say he loved him?

Someone stole the puck right off Nicky and Alex rushed after them with murder in his heart. Like hell anyone was taking one of Nicky’s passes off him—like hell they would take hockey, _Washington_ hockey, from him.

*

They played awful back-to-back games and because they were the team’s ancients, they were graciously given a maintenance day to get their fucking shit together.

Alex drove to Nicky’s house at ten in the morning with a bottle of excellent vodka. Nicky stared at Alex, scoffed at the vodka, and then let him into his house.

“Just sit down,” Nicky said. “I’m not drinking.”

“Neither am I,” Alex said. Regardless, Alex put the bottle on the coffee table and then nudged it closer to Nicky. “Engagement present.”

“Whatever.” Nicky moved to the opposite end of the couch from Alex, his back against the armrest. “What do you want to say to me?”

A softball, one Alex returned easily. “I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. You did all this to help me, to make me happy.”

“Are you actually sorry or do you just want to say that you’re sorry?”

“I’m SORRY, Nicky,” Alex said, then cleared his throat because he didn’t want to raise his voice again and maybe that would help. Maybe. “I’m sorry I hurt you, but I’m angry. Of course I’m angry. All I wanted was to win for my country, and now I have to win for yours, if any country ever lets me play for them again. Maybe if Osh adopts me I can play for America, too.”

Nicky cracked a smile, but not much of one.

They were quiet and Alex wondered if Nicky had anything to say, or if he was the only one who wanted answers.

“Nicky,” he said. “Did you mean that? When you—after you kissed me. Did you mean it?”

Nicky stared at his coffee table, not at Alex.

“I did.” Nicky swallowed, too, clearing his throat. “I did. A long time ago.”

“When?”

“Dynamo.”

“You loved me in Moscow?”

“I did,” Nicky said. “And I—you wanted me to come with you so much. You asked so much, I thought, okay, I’ll go to Russia with Alex, and we’ll play hockey, and I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him I want to be with him and he’ll say yes. He wants me in Russia, Russia is his home, so he must want me.”

Alex remembered Moscow better than any other time in his life. He remembered the beautiful apartment the Dynamo owners had gifted him, and he remembered Nicky’s face when he saw the place where they would live together. He remembered how happy Nicky seemed, but he remembered thinking that Nicky seemed happiest in Moscow when Alex was happy. When they scored, when they drank, when they danced, when they sat on the couch together and worked on Nicky’s Russian by watching terrible soap operas and kid’s shows—every time he looked at Nicky and smiled, Nicky was already bursting at the seams with happiness. They were happy. He was in love.

“But you didn’t say anything,” Alex said and, damn him, he was choked up again, because god forbid his body ever work the same around Nicky ever again. It wasn't as though their lives depended on it.

“You were so happy in Moscow,” Nicky said. “You were so happy to be home. How could you want me when—look at us now. All I ever do is take you away from Moscow. From your home. You would always love Russia more than you could ever love me.”

Alex looked away; he wished his heart would just shred itself to pieces already, for all the good it did him these days. What was worse: Nicky was right. Alex loved his home and he loved his country and he loved Nicky; now he had lost all but one of those things. How could Nicky ever be enough? How could one person be everything to another?

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Nicky said.

Alex sighed. “I’m sorry I took you for granted.” Alex watched Nicky shift on the couch, tuck one of his knees close to his chest.

“You should be,” Nicky said.

“You were always there, and then you weren’t,” Alex said. “I loved you then. I should have said something, but.”

“But what?”

He had to push through that feeling, the one in his chest that told him that if he ever admitted he loved a man, to his face, he would die. He would have to push past it. It wasn’t true. He could do this. He could survive this.

Of course he would survive this; he had survived worse and there was worse to come.

“I loved Yasha,” Alex said. “From when we were fifteen until I left for Washington. I loved him and I never told him. Then I met you and I loved you and I never told you.”

“Why did you stop?”

“Why did you?”

Nicky wasn’t happy with that. He huffed and looked away from Alex, waiting for Alex to offer him more in penance, but Alex had nothing left. The only things he wanted in his life were glory for his country and someone to love him the way he loved, and Nicky had taken both of those from him. What else could he give Nicky that would satisfy him?

“That’s it, Nicky. That’s it.”

“I guess so.” Nicky sighed. “Well.”

“Well, what?”

“Well,” Nicky began. “We were in love with each other and now we can’t stand each other. Our families think we betrayed them; our friends despise us; our management hopes we’re run over by buses so we can stop being such pains in their asses; your country might have me murdered to bring you back to them, and my country granting you a visa killed all your dreams. We’re dropping like a sack of flaming shit through the standings, and we had ten years to win a Stanley Cup but we’ve never come close.” Nicky took a deep breath and nodded to himself. “I think… this is as bad as it’s going to get.”

“Someone from You Can Play said we betray the queer community because we won’t let them make a t-shirt with our faces,” Alex said. “Or socks. They sent me socks, too.”

Nicky laughed. He threw his head back and let out a manic laugh that Alex had only heard, oh, every time they lost a playoff series.

“God, they hate us, too! What a fucking wreck!” Nicky grinned at Alex and rolled his eyes. “Isn’t that good? It can’t get worse. Oh, fuck.” Nicky laughed again. “We have nothing left but each other, and we don’t even want each other anymore.”

Nicky was contagious; Alex laughed, too, and dragged his hands down his face. “Oh, god, Nicky. No one but me knows what a piece of shit you are.”

Nicky smiled. “Maybe you’re the husband I deserve.”

“No,” Alex said. “No, you deserve better.”

Nicky nodded and looked away. “So do you. We both deserve better.”

“It’s okay, Nicky. We can be friends again. We have to be.” Alex edged closer on the couch and drew Nicky’s attention. “We have to be friends. No one else wants us.”

Nicky burst out laughing all over again and Alex had to laugh, too, because they had ruined their lives and ruined each other and now they _had_ each other and didn’t _want_ each other. It was par for the course, when it came to Alex getting what he wanted.

*

They had a home game the following night. Alex and Nicky had warmed up on this ice and a hundred others like it in all the years they had played together. Most nights they kept near each other during warm-ups and everyone knew not to bother them: they had to stand close, stare at the net and take a few shots, stretch, say one or two words to each other, pass the puck back and forth from various distances, and that was it. That was the entirety of their ritual; that was all it took to wake up whatever connection was between them. With that they could find each other, over and over again, every night in every city in every season they had been together.

Alex was stretching on the ice, warming up his knees and thighs as Nicky stood over him, sort of stretching but mostly staring off into the distance. Alex knew it wasn’t just hockey that Nicky was trying to focus on, but the feeling of cameras on him. Crowds didn’t intimidate Nicky, but Alex knew he needed time to shift into his camera skin, where he was all business and a thousand years from the Nicky they knew.

“Hey, come down here,” Alex said. It took Nicky a moment, but he looked down and stared at Alex. “Yeah, come down,” Alex repeated.

“You come up,” Nicky said.

“Compromise,” Alex said. “I ask, you come.”

Nicky said, “No,” but he bent over to meet Alex’s face anyway. “What?”

Alex couldn’t remember why they had stopped wearing their helmets during warm-ups, but he could still remember the first time Nicky followed suit, his hair flying out behind him until they settled next to each other. Now, Nicky leaning down over him, Nicky’s long hair falling in waves around his face, it took Alex a second to remember why he had asked Nicky to come down when all he wanted to do was kiss him.

Oh. That was it. He wanted to kiss Nicky.

“Have a good game,” Alex said.

“What?” Nicky asked.

“We’re going to play good tonight,” Alex said, and then he leaned in and kissed the corner of Nicky’s mouth. He raised his hand to cup Nicky’s cheek and pressed his lips to Nicky’s for a moment, before he pulled away again and nodded decisively to himself.

“Sasha,” Nicky said.

Alex nearly pulled something when turning that quickly. The nickname startled him; to Nicky, he hadn’t been Sasha since Moscow—since Alex had played for his home.

“Good game,” Nicky repeated, and then he leaned in and kissed Alex’s lips.

When he pulled away, Alex stared at him and swallowed hard.

“We’re doing this?” Nicky asked.

“We gonna have a good game? Sure.”

Nicky grinned at him and Alex was sure his knees and their useless jelly consistency weren’t going to let him off the ice anytime soon.

“Sasha,” Nicky said, still smiling.

“Yes, we’re doing this,” Alex said. “Fuck everyone.”

Nicky stayed for another moment, then skated off and went hunting for pucks to shoot into the net. Alex stayed where he was to loosen up a bit more before heading to the net. The lightness he felt wasn’t new, but familiar and a little sad as it came back to him: it felt like 2011, the first full season after Nicky signed his ten-year contract extension. That spring, Tampa swept them in the second round. They had come back home and Alex had found Nicky skating alone on the ice before the reporters and the rest of the team arrived.

Nicky and his barely visible beard were skating laps when Alex caught up with him, but Nicky stopped short, his back against the glass.

“We did our best, Backy, okay?” Alex had said.

“I can’t stop thinking about that money,” Nicky said. “They gave me six million dollars to lose again.”

“And they gave me ten,” Alex said. “We did our best. We’ll do better.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” Alex said. “But we’ll try. Fuck everyone who says we don’t.”

Nicky had laughed a little. “I don’t want to fuck that many people. I don’t know where they’ve been.”

Alex had laughed and pulled Nicky in for a tight hug, the two of them holding each other on the ice for a long time, probably too long, but like hell either of them cared. They were overpaid losers and for the next nine years, they could only count on each other. They would only have each other.

“Come on,” Nicky’s voice called, because they had a game to play. It had been seven fucking years since they lost in the second round to Tampa and Nicky was still there, on the ice with Alex, ready to shoot at him as the terrible warm-up music blared around them. Nicky was there and they were going to be married, and now they would really only have each other.

*

For reasons that had everything to do with their (subpar for them) performance that season and nothing to do with the outing-that-cracked-the-ice, both Alex and Nicky were named to the All-Star Game that year.

That was in early January, days before their visa interviews, before the news broke that Alex Ovechkin was—

That he was marrying Nicklas Backstrom and asking for the right to make his home in Sweden. When Alex was finished with hockey and when he was ready to go home, he would go with Nicky and they would make a home. Where Nicky went, he would follow.

Once, that would have struck him as deeply romantic. It was something he would have _loved_ to say while staring into Nicky’s eyes, before biting a bruise somewhere wonderful and obvious on Nicky’s thick neck, hiding his face away so Nicky didn’t see how much he meant it.

It wasn’t the same, now.

Of course, just as he and Nicky were starting to be okay again, their hideous 2018 ASG jerseys arrived.

Alex and Nicky sat side-by-side in front of Alex’s stall and stared into the box of ASG _garbage_ the league had sent, a stack of red, white, and blue jerseys with rainbow piping god damned _everywhere_.

“Why did they send so many?” Alex asked. “Do they think we’re going to sell them out of my car?”

“I think you’ll have to,” Nicky said. “We need a reason why all our shitty All-Star jerseys disappeared, so we might as well make a few bucks off them.”

Alex laughed, then picked up the box and left the Kettler dressing room. He could hear the crowd gathered to watch their morning practice and he still had a pretty good arm these days. Who didn’t love a free jersey?

The next box of jerseys was also terrible. This time, the nightmare box was accompanied by an Official NHL Photographer, an Official NHL Media Person, and some kind of security asshole to ensure that the garish secret designs weren’t accidentally-deliberately leaked again because Alex had decided to fuck up everything within his reach.

“They’re nice,” Nicky said carefully to the Official NHL Photographer and Official NHL Media Person. “Alex was so excited to share the design with our fans.”

The photographer had the good grace to laugh sarcastically.

“Yeah, I’m _sure_ this makes up for not wearing a Team Russia uniform this year.”

In the time it took Alex to slip the jersey over his head, he realized that he was hurt. His feelings were _hurt_ . It had been so genuinely fucking long since a single piece of bullshit or spite had managed to penetrate his shell that it took him an honest-to-fuck _moment_ to realize that the baffled ache around his heart was—it was hurt. He was _hurt_ . This asshole was here, doing his job, and he had _hurt him_ , just to see what would happen.

“Too soon?” the photographer asked, realizing too late that he had made a fucking mistake.

Alex laughed a little as he leaned in close to Nicky and slung an arm around his shoulders. “Nicky, I hate him and I want him to die,” Alex whispered in Russian. “You’re good with words. Tell me what to say.”

Alex leaned away a little so he could glance at Nicky’s face—

Ah, shit, he had seen this face before.

“They’re very nice,” Nicky repeated. “It’s a shame we won’t wear them. We won’t attend the All-Star Game to protest the league’s refusal to participate in the Olympics.”

The photographer fumbled his camera, caught it in mid-air, then started snapping photos again. The Caps’ GM, who had been making small talk while occasionally offering adorable conversational prompts, turned his head like an owl so his eyes bore holes into Nicky and Alex.

“Easy for other people to forget, obviously,” Alex said slowly into the recorder that the Official NHL Media Person nearly shoved into his mouth to make sure they got every word. “The Olympics are still very important to me, they’re _everything_ to me, and even with all other things—even if Russia did want me, the league would punish the team if we left. Both of us want to play in the Olympics, always.”

“So we won’t attend the All-Star Game,” Nicky said decisively. “These are nice jerseys. I’m going to give them out to the nice women in the parking lot who look a little cold.”

The NHL security person stopped Nicky as he stood up and the two of them tried to laugh it off as a joke. The joke died miserably, as did Alex’s plans to wallow in self-loathing and Florida for a weekend.

“We can spend the weekend together,” Nicky said. “A nice long weekend since we’ve been bad and can’t play that Thursday.”

Alex stared at Nicky, then let his face crack a smile, because he was a man spending a suddenly-free weekend with his fiancé and that was something people smiled about. He didn’t know what it would actually mean for him and Nicky, but it was bound to be… something.

*

One day as they dressed for practice, Alex whistled at Nicky and threw a ring of keys at him.

A comment slipped out of Tom’s mouth before he could stop himself: “Did you buy Papa something pretty?” Tom looked extremely disappointed to have broken his own grudge against his captains, but there was a hint of curiosity there, too, that didn’t look too much like anger.

“Changed the locks,” Alex lied, because fuck, he could not stop _lying_ to his _team_. “Keys for Nicky to give the dog sitter, for when we go to Sweden this summer.”

The room fell silent.

“You’re going to Sweden?” Dima asked in Russian.

Alex looked at Dima, then looked to Nicky, and wondered why the fuck he had said _Sweden this summer_ when they were going on a road trip the next fucking _day_.

“Yes,” Nicky said, because they were going to make honest men of each other. Apparently, that meant lying to everyone in their lives for as long as they both should live. “Alex can finally come to Sweden, like we wanted.”

“I want to come to Sweden,” Alex said. “And we have to look for a house.”

“What’s wrong with my house?” Nicky asked. “You haven’t even seen my house in Sweden.”

“It’s _your_ house,” Alex said. “Not _our_ house.”

“Uh, hate to break it to you,” Osh interrupted. “But that’s kinda your fucking deal here, too, isn’t it?”

Kuzya pulled out his phone like he was answering it. “Hello, yes, is this the King of Sweden? Yes, there are two men here who live together in separate mansions and never go out together. No, not on vacation, either. They don’t even like each other unless they’re working together, but that can be a—shit, you know, a kink, for some people. Yes, maybe not being friends is a sex thing. What? Give them a visa immediately? Oh, of course, how could I be so stupid to ask, they’re rich and famous and they’ve won so many medals—”

“You love us, Nicky,” Andre interrupted. “You laugh with all of us. It’s only the cameras you hate, and Ovi. Which one was the lie? That you love us, or that you love him?”

Andre was right; when the cameras were away, Nicky never stopped smiling and laughing, never stopped whispering jokes into people’s ears and putting his arms around them. He kept his distance from Alex because being close to Alex was—they were what they wanted most, and what they couldn’t have. These days, Alex could understand that too well.

As Alex considered what Andre said, Nicky stood up from his stall and asked the few coaching staff to leave so they could have a quick meeting, players only. They protested at being left out, of course, but Nicky was immovable when it came to protecting the team. Coaches came and went but the team was theirs, his and Alex’s.

“All right,” Nicky announced from the center of the room, his voice barely above its normal speaking volume. “Alex is marrying me for Swedish citizenship.” He did some strange gesture with his hands, like a clap that turned into a _so there_ , then put his hands on his hips. “You were right. Alex and I have been friends a long time, even though you say we haven’t been close lately. I would still do anything for him, so when that shit happened with the writer, I told him that. I would do anything for him. So we’re going to marry because Russia is not an option for him for the next few years.” Nicky looked at Andre. “We don’t hate each other. We’re just not in love. You all have very high and ridiculous standards for proving people are in love, by the way. Even if we were a couple, you probably wouldn’t believe us from the way you all talk.”

“Hold up,” Osh said. “Are we complicit in a felony now? Like, a Swedish felony?”

“I don’t care,” Nicky said.

“I fucking do,” Oshie said.

“Well, lie about it,” Nicky said.

“I’m not a _liar_ ,” Oshie snapped.

“It’s only luck that you never had to learn,” Nicky said. “Enough of all this, all right? The truth is _so_ important to all of you, so whatever the truth is? Now you have it.” Nicky stood in the middle of the room for another moment, hands still fixed on his hips. “Are we finished? Should I let the coaches back inside?”

“So you’ve just—” Holtz was in his corner, caught by this abrupt meeting in the middle of his warm-up stretches with all his gear. When Nicky started talking, he rearranged himself on the floor so that now he looked like a large bearded toddler smothered in endless pads. “You’re friends, marrying each other for citizenship, and the story outside is that you’ve been together since the last lockout and you’re finally allowed to be public about it, and you’re getting married this summer in Sweden.” Holtz met their eyes, Nicky’s first and then Alex’s, and then shrugged. “Fine. You could have said that from the beginning.”

“We could have done a lot of things differently, _from the beginning_ ,” Nicky said.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Holtz said. “You’re making everything up as we go along. Don’t be upset with us when we can’t keep up because you didn’t tell us where we’re going. We all want our private lives to stay private; we all took care of Latts when he came to us, before he was ready to be open about his life to guys on other teams. Of course we’d do that for you.”

“Everything’s always our fault,” Nicky sighed.

“I said stop that,” Holtz said. “Yeah. Some things are.” Holtz shook his head and kneeled up to start his stretches again. “All of you can keep discussing this if you want. I support you. I’ll do whatever you guys want. Just tell us first, okay?”

“We know, Holtz,” Alex interrupted. “We should have said the whole thing, but we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know if they’d approve my visa. Now they did, so it’s okay. We can tell you, and we know it’s just for us to know, for the team.”

“See? That makes sense, too,” Holtz said.

As promised, Holtz went back to his stretches and Alex glanced around the room to look for other reactions before they disappeared into all their idiotic hockey stoicism.

“So you’re not—” It was Tom again, phone in hand because he was a child and probably texting Latta that very moment, damn him. Alex watched him all the same, Tom looking away, then looking at Alex before he looked away again. “Are you guys even—”

Alex laughed because, shit. “I am,” Alex said. “Yes. Gay. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Beags said.

“I’ll be sorry if I fucking want to,” Alex said. “Everything would be a lot easier if I were different in every way.”

Beags looked at him like a kicked dog, then looked away.

“But you’re not in love with each other,” Tom interrupted.

“The fuck does that matter?” Nicky asked.

“Holy shit, you assholes!” Carly yelled. “Because we fucking care about you! You guys and Beags are the only ones left from when I got here like, nine years ago, and you’re acting like we’re fucking out of our minds to care about what happens to you! We fucking care about you!”

“We had to protect ourselves,” Nicky said. “You don’t know—”

“We’re not saying we do know—because, let’s make it clear, _we don’t_ —we’re saying that you shouldn’t act so fucking surprised that we want to help you not get deported or exposed.”

“Okay, we’re done,” Nicky said.

“We’re not done!” Andre protested. Alex and the rest of them watched Andre rattle something off in Swedish, his voice shaking with the rest of him. Alex missed Jojo so much, the reasonable medium between Andre’s rushing in and Nicky’s cold distance.

Alex knew some Swedish, though, and knew Andre kept saying the word _house_ and variations on that: _I lived in your house, you let me into your house, your life_ and _your house_. From what Alex understood, he was thankful he didn’t understand more.

“We’ll talk later, then,” Nicky flatly said to Andre. “What about the rest of you? What else do you want to yell at us about?”

The room was quiet again. As Nicky took a step back to the door to let the coaches back inside, Kuzya cleared his throat and spoke up, in Russian.

“The writer, then,” Kuzya asked. “You don’t love Nicky, but you loved this writer before America. If you weren’t going to marry Nicky, would you marry him?”

“The fuck kind of question is that?”

“It’s my question,” Kuzya said.

“Fine. No, I wouldn’t,” Alex said. “But—but some man. Yes. It’s only been them.”

“Them?” Dima asked, in English.

Alex looked at Dima and Kuzya. “It’s only been men,” he said, and that was their answer.

“We’re staying home from the All-Star Game,” Alex announced. “Telling people it’s a protest and also like a vacation we can actually take together because we don’t have to pretend we live apart anymore. We’re going to stay at my house and figure some things out.”

“Can I tell Latts? Please?” Tom asked. “Can I tell him you weren’t lying to him the whole time he was here?”

Nicky looked at Alex. “Fine with me, if it’s fine with Alex,” Nicky said.

“Can I tell him about you?” Tom asked Alex.

Alex nodded. “Tell him he has my phone, even if he’s mad and wants to yell. Who doesn’t want to yell at me? My mother calls me almost every night to yell at me. She’s going to come early for the playoffs, just so she can yell at me for a couple of weeks. Latts can come, too.”

“Are you going to Sweden?” Dima asked in English. “Is that real?” He switched back to Russian to ask the real question, the one that was making Alex tear up just looking at him. “Are you never coming home again?”

“You think they’d let me?” Alex asked in Russian.

Dima shook the answer off like a dog who didn’t like his bath, then stood up in front of his stall, turning his back to the room so he could finish changing. Kuzya walked over to pat Dima on the shoulder and hug him quickly before he went back to his stall to change, too.

“Okay,” Nicky said. “We’re done.”


	3. Chapter 3

Their plan for the ASG weekend was to use the time to get their shit together: review paperwork sent over by their lawyers, review more immigration paperwork, look at online listings of houses around Gävle that Nicky’s Swedish realtor had sent his way, and maybe actually watch the stupid pageant known as the NHL All-Star Game.

Nicky used his new keys to let himself into Alex’s house. From the direction of the sitting room, Nicky could hear Alex speaking Russian and a slightly crackly voice speaking Russian back. As Nicky stepped further into the house, Alex left the room and met Nicky in the foyer, his fingers tapping at a giant iPad in his hand. Nicky noticed Alex was home and wearing a shirt; if Nicky remembered right, that meant he was talking to his family and it was not going well.

“Talking to Mama, I’m—I’ll be upstairs, okay? Back soon.”

“Is everything all right?” Nicky asked.

Alex shot him a look. It wasn’t angry or annoyed or _fuck Nicky of course not_ ; it was sadder than that, and that was worse, somehow, than Nicky being obvious.

“I brought beer,” Nicky said, nodding towards the kitchen.

“Okay, be back,” Alex said as he rushed upstairs.

Nicky listened to Alex move around upstairs, walking rapidly towards the master bedroom. As Nicky put the bottles of beer in the fridge, he could hear the crackly Russian and Alex’s Russian start up again. The voices were too distant and too rapid for him to keep up without making his way towards the big staircase and quietly creeping upstairs.

He and Alex hadn’t been close in years, but he knew that Alex’s stance on mandatory shirtlessness at home hadn’t changed.

Nicky was at the top landing just outside the master bedroom when the voice of Alex’s mother finally became clear enough for him to understand. It sounded like she was listing things off and Alex was agreeing—no, not agreeing, but acknowledging. _Okay, okay, okay, I understand, okay_.

Then Alex was quiet.

“Sasha, this is your last chance,” his mother said across all that distance. “Look how much they want to give you. Were you listening? Sasha, come home and take it all back, and you can have everything.”

“Mama—”

“Sasha, listen to me! Everything, you have _everything_. Your agent and I have it in writing, Sasha: they buy out your Washington contract and they make you captain of the Olympic team. Then a guaranteed KHL contract, almost twice what you were making in Washington.”

“Mama, how can they promise that? How can you believe that? You know players aren’t being paid and _you know_ they’re trying to push Russia out of the Olympics because of what happened last time. You think that promise—”

“Not a promise, a _contract_. How many more Olympics do you think you have left?”

“Mama, please—”

“Sasha, _come home_. Please, please come home. You’ve been in America too long. This isn’t _right_ , Sasha.”

Nicky finally stepped into the doorway of Alex’s bedroom. Alex looked up, no time to hide his wet red-rimmed eyes. He thought Alex might get up and slam the door in his face, but Alex was almost trembling as he tried to hold the iPad steady in front of him.

“Sasha? Sasha, who’s there? Is it Backstrom? Is it Yasha? Is it another man?”

“No, Mama,” Alex said. “I’m just thinking. I’m thinking.”

“Sasha, what is there to think about? You are _Russian_ and you are—Sasha, what are you _doing_? I have to find out from other people that you got a Swedish visa? That you never want to come home again? Sasha, this is insane. You have to come home. You _must_ come home. Come home and stop all this _nonsense_ with this man, with America, and—”

“And what, Mama,” Alex asked. “What happens? Let’s say I come home. I come home, they buy my contract with Washington, they make me captain for the Olympics, we go and we win or lose. Okay, then I come back to Russia and I play for whatever KHL team will take me. They put all their money into paying me and my other teammates don’t get paid—”

“Sasha it’s not—”

“I play in the KHL and maybe win another championship, but not a Stanley Cup. Okay, I play and I play and I play until I retire. What do I do then?”

“Anything! Anything you want, Sasha, you have freedom, you do anything you want!”

“Mama, please,” Alex said. “You know what happens. I give interviews. I do magazine shoots. I have billboards again. I buy another big house. I get more dogs. I never get married. I do interviews about how much I love Russia and how glad I am to be home, about how bad America was for me, and I never get married. You never have grandchildren from me.”

“Sasha, you’re being dramatic. You can have anything you want—”

“I want a husband!” Alex yelled. “Are you listening to me? I never talk about the time I was going to marry a man. I never talk about my friend who loved me, and I loved him, too. I never talk about getting married, to anyone. I live in my big houses with my big dogs and you and Papa die and I have _no one_. I come back home and there is _no one_ for me. You know they never let me have someone. You _know_ everyone will watch me and make sure I never—that I’m never close to any man, ever. You want me to be alone and to die alone.”

“How can you give up your country for some man?”

“How can my country ask me to give up this man!”

Nicky stepped closer. Alex looked _wrecked_ , his voice shaking as he spoke.

“How can you ask me that, Mama,” Alex asked, his eyes fixed on Nicky. “I wanted to have a big family and have you and Papa and Misha here for New Year’s, and take our babies to the summer house every year. I wanted you to see my family, but you only want to see me in Russia, alone. Flags and medals and cups and no family, no one that’s just for me.”

“You can have a family in Russia! Don’t be absurd! You don’t need a man for that, Sasha.”

“I _want_ a man, Mama!”

Alex took a deep breath and shut his eyes.

“Mama, Nicky is here. I have to go. I love you. Tell Papa I love him, too. Bye.”

Nicky sat down on the bed with Alex and watched him end the call over his mother’s protests. He watched Alex close the app, find his mother’s phone numbers and emails, and block them one by one. He watched him do the same for his father, for other relatives in Russia Nicky had heard of over the years, for Russian names that Nicky only vaguely knew from Alex’s life. When he was finished, Alex put the iPad aside and folded his hands in his lap.

“I’m so sorry,” Nicky said.

Alex said nothing. Nicky reached for Alex and pulled him into a hug. Alex relaxed, a little, so Nicky pulled him down onto the bed and arranged their bodies, Alex on top of Nicky, their legs entwined together, Nicky’s arms firmly wrapped around as much of Alex as he could manage. Alex pulled Nicky closer and buried his face against Nicky’s shoulder, against his soft sweater. Nicky kissed his hair and pressed himself closer, the two of them breathing slowly and clutching each other until they both fell asleep.

*

Nicky woke up hours later, disoriented and dry-mouthed and with a headache that had to be from crying where Alex couldn’t see him. It had been mid-afternoon when he had arrived at Alex’s, but it was still winter; only a few hours later, it was dark outside the bedroom.

Alex was still in Nicky’s arms. Nicky pulled away a little and looked down at Alex. When he looked up at Nicky, Nicky stroked Alex’s hair gently and kissed his forehead. What else could he do when Alex had given up everyone who mattered to him for Nicky, for some love he didn’t know he would ever find?

“Tell me something good about Sweden,” Alex whispered.

“I wish it was Russia,” Nicky said. “I wish it was yours. I wish I could give you a country that was perfect and yours.”

“I know,” Alex said, his eyes tearing up again. “I know you would. But tell me something good about Sweden.”

“We have saunas,” Nicky said. “You can wear your special banya hat if you still want to. I’ll take you to the one I visit over the summer. I’ll take you to all the saunas I like best.”

“You take your clothes off at the sauna?” Alex asked. “You hate taking your clothes off.”

“I hate taking my clothes off _here_ , because Americans are disgusting. I never wear shirts at home.”

Alex laughed, the smile finally reaching his eyes. “Really? If I come to Sweden, you’ll never wear a shirt?”

“Never. Unless you want to put me on Instagram, then I’ll put on a shirt. I made my lawyer put it in the prenup: no shirtless pictures of me on Instagram, ever.”

“What about Snapchat?”

“No, not Snapchat, either.”

“Nicky,” Alex whined.

“You can take them, just can’t put them online.”

“Okay, I can compromise. Your nipples drive a hard bargain.”

Nicky laughed, finally pulling out of the cramped knot of limbs that they had formed as they fell asleep earlier. Once he was free and had stretched a little, he leaned over and pulled Alex back. Alex came to him without protest, with only a little awkwardness. He rested his cheek on Nicky’s shoulder and wrapped an arm around Nicky’s chest.

“Did you mean that,” Nicky asked. “That you—”

“Yes,” Alex said. “I meant everything. I understand if you don’t—”

“I do,” Nicky said. “I want that. I want a family. I want you to have a family, too. I didn’t know you wanted one so much. I thought—you’re good with kids, I didn’t know if you wanted them. Wanted your own. I thought you wanted an army of dogs, maybe a cat or two to keep it interesting.”

“I have sheep, too,” Alex said. “You never came to my summer house in Russia. I had a couple of sheep there. They were a gift.”

“I have a lot of land in Gävle,” Nicky said. “They can live there with us.”

Alex nodded, tightened his arm around Nicky.

“Food?” Nicky asked. “You’re hungry? I’ll order, you turn on your monster TV to the NHL channel so we can see Osh and Andre at the competition.”

Alex nodded again, but neither of them moved until Alex’s stomach rumbled and made him sigh.

“Lots of dumplings,” Alex said. “And soup. I want good, spicy soup, please.”

Alex stood up from the bed and held out his hand to help Nicky up. They stood there for a long moment before Alex pulled Nicky into his arms again, this time for a gentle hug that lasted only a moment before Alex headed downstairs, the lights in the house coming on as he went.

*

Alex’s sitting room had recliners and couches big enough and deep enough to devour men whole. The two of them dragged Alex’s leviathan coffee table in front of the big couch and spread out their mess of Chinese food, Nicky placing the hot and sour soup directly in front of Alex along with plastic containers of dumplings. Alex had turned the TV to the NHL network, the ASG proceedings set to a gentle blare. It seemed neither of them were particularly in the mood for more yelling in their faces that evening.

They ate and shot little comments back and forth at each other—the ridiculous thing Andre was doing to his facial hair this season, the way Osh was mixing and mingling with everyone else on the ice, vying for Miss Congeniality in Alex’s honor. Nicky sat back against the massive softness of the couch when he was finished eating. He glanced over and Alex was done, too—he only touched the soup and dumplings, and even those he hadn’t finished. He was sitting on the other side of the couch, hands folded in his lap, and for the _life_ of him, Nicky couldn’t figure out what bothered him so much about Alex sitting that way.

Nicky realized it was restraint. It was Alex restraining himself. He did it on the ice, the energy building in his legs during a faceoff, the tension as someone tried to start a fight with him, his jaw tight at the questions people asked him day in and day out, the way he left Kettler without making eye contact for fear of guilt dragging him back to give autographs he couldn’t offer. This was Alex restraining himself in his own house and it felt wrong to Nicky.

“Alex,” Nicky said gently, his voice breaking the white noise from the TV. Alex glanced at him and raised his eyebrows. “Would you—could you sit with me? Closer?”

Alex blinked, then nodded and edged closer on the couch. He folded his hands in his lap again. It wasn’t just that Alex was holding back in his own house; Nicky didn’t want him to hold back at all. How could they get back their friendship, how could they marry and build a life together if Alex was going to do what he always did and swallow his feelings, then twist them into something awful?

Not that Nicky was much better at this, any of this. Not that Nicky could see in Alex now anything he hadn't already seen in himself.

“Do you know what you said before,” Nicky began. “When you said that you wanted a family, and kids, and holidays and everything, and I said I did, too?”

“I know,” Alex said. “It was a lot of emotions, Nicky, you don’t have to—”

“Alex, I want those things,” Nicky said. “But before that, I need you to touch me.”

“...what?”

Nicky stared ahead at the TV. So many of the conversations they had had in the past few months were about Alex’s feelings, Alex’s history, Alex’s situation, and Nicky didn’t begrudge him that. Alex had kept so much of himself buried so deep, content to let it die until some asshole writer decided to mine into their lives and look for something to show off and sell.

Still. It hadn’t been easy for Nicky. Nicky was going to be in this marriage, too. He needed things, too.

“Whatever kind of arrangement we work out, if we even work one out,” Nicky said slowly. “I still—if you’re going to be my husband, I need touch. I need to be held and kissed and I need my hand in yours, and—and I can’t go very long without those things.” Nicky finally looked over at Alex and his wide eyes. “Is that—do you want that? I understand if it’s unacceptable, but I thought since you—since we cared about each other before, maybe—”

“I didn’t know you wanted that now,” Alex said. “I thought—when you said you didn’t love me anymore, that was it. The door was closed. I thought you wouldn’t want me to touch you, ever.”

Something welled up in Nicky’s throat, something so thick that Nicky had a hard time keeping it down.

“Alex,” Nicky whispered. “Sasha, please.”

Alex moved right into Nicky’s space and pulled him into a tight embrace, then let him go and rested his arm across Nicky’s shoulders. Nicky stayed like that until Alex tugged at his sweater, his hand resting on Nicky’s waist.

“Are you comfortable?” Alex asked. “Sit closer. Get close to me.”

“Okay,” Nicky said.

“Nicky, you never have to ask,” Alex said. He leaned in and pressed a kiss to Nicky’s temple, then whispered again, “Never, okay? Never. You hold me, I hold you.”

Nicky nodded and pulled his legs up onto the couch, leaning against Alex and wrapping his arms around his waist, his face tilted towards the TV. Alex shifted and made room for Nicky’s body against his, a firm arm around his shoulders and a hand on Nicky’s leg, all of him contorted to hold as much of Nicky as he could.

“I remember your first year, you were so serious, so quiet,” Alex asked quietly. “They asked me if I was taking care of you and I told them, I think you were taking care of me.”

Nicky tensed against Alex’s chest. He wanted to run. He did consider making a break for it. He could tear himself out of Alex’s arms, get in his car, and speed back to his house to forget that he had ever been warm and secure like this, with Alex.

Alex seemed to feel that. He hugged Nicky closer for a moment, then relaxed his hold again.

“You always take care of me, Nicky. Let me take care of you. Let me, okay?”

Nicky couldn’t speak. He couldn’t say _yes_ to this fundamentally stupid thing, where he let someone “take care of him,” like that was something people did in real life. He couldn’t say _no_ and push away what he had wanted so much for so long. He swallowed thickly and tightened his arms around Alex.

“Please,” Nicky whispered.

Alex stroked his hair, his hands heavy on Nicky. He held Nicky close, the impulse to escape fading with every inhale and exhale against Alex’s chest. Nicky barely watched the skills competition, but he breathed deeply and felt more at ease in his body than he had in months.

“Stay the night,” Alex said a while later.

Nicky nodded and closed his eyes, relaxing even more against Alex, who held him up, held him close.

*

Before Nicky went to play for Moscow during the lockout, he and Alex were young, their team was young, and they all lived in each other’s pockets. They crashed at each other’s houses, most often Alex’s since he was the captain, he had the big house where he could fit most of the team. His guest rooms were kept immaculately clean and ready for anything.

Nicky and Greenie used to claim the guest room next to the master suite, letting Alex retreat to his room while the two of them cackled like hyenas. In those days, Nicky would starfish onto the bed and complain about how warm the sheets were before Greenie tucked him in and the two of them passed out, drooling on Alex’s fancy pillowcases until Alex woke them all up and ordered everyone breakfast the next morning.

It had been five years since Moscow, three years since Greenie had left, the first time Nicky woke up in Alex’s bed. _His_ bed, the one in the master suite, the one they had cried and napped on the previous day after Alex’s emotional call with his mother.

Nicky woke up with a view of Alex’s back to him. He stretched his legs a little, shifted his hips to make that one joint pop, then realized that Alex’s bed was bigger than a king, longer than a California king, because Nicky had slept in beds around the world and in Alex’s bed, his feet didn’t come close to the edge and Alex was very, very far away.

Alex was curled up on his side, near the edge of the bed, whole _feet_ between himself and Nicky. His arm was curled under his pillow and Nicky, who had woken up in bed with this man, didn’t think he could ever reach him.

Nicky wondered how many other men had woken up in Alex’s bed like this.

It was too early for his stomach to churn with this much jealousy and pity.

“Alex,” Nicky whispered across the bed. “Alex.”

Nicky didn’t want to touch him, just in case it startled him and Alex threw him off, pushed him away, pulled the sheets closer around his bare chest, laughed Nicky off, climbed out of bed and left Nicky there. No, no, there was nothing in the past day that said Alex would do that, but—

“Alex, are you awake?” Nicky asked.

Why did it always have to be him? Why did he always have to reach first and speak first and touch first, why the _fuck_ couldn’t Alex _wake up_ and _be there_?

Nicky climbed out of bed and didn’t give a _fuck_ if it woke him up. He gathered his clothes from the chair on his side of the bed and as he walked around the room to the en suite, near Alex’s side of the bed—

“Nicky? You going?”

Nicky turned around, dressed in only his briefs and socks, his jeans and shirt and sweater gathered in his arms like he had just robbed someone for every unfashionable item they owned.

“You’re awake,” Nicky said.

“I am now,” Alex said. “You wake up like a horse.”

“How would you know? When has a horse woken you up?”

Alex stared at him for a long moment, then made a sound and closed his eyes. “Shut up, I’m asleep, I’m not funny like you when I’m asleep.”

Unfortunately, Nicky was getting chillier the longer he stood in the middle of Alex’s bedroom in just his briefs and his socks and his worst weekend wear clutched to his chest.

“You want me to stay?” Nicky asked.

Alex opened his eyes. He was still asleep on the edge of the bed, clutching the side like it was some kind of comfort to him when he had six feet of bed behind him. Did he sprawl when he slept alone? Would he never be comfortable again, if they had to share a room when they were married? How ridiculous. They could afford bedrooms. They could afford anything. They could build a fucking master suite the size of a hotel luxury suite, a giant apartment within a house that was just for them, with all the fucking custom ocean-sized beds and luxury bathrooms and fucking whatever else they needed to live together and stay apart. They could fucking do it. They didn’t have to live this shitty little pageant today, or any other day, ever.

“Nicky, stay,” Alex said. “I’ll make breakfast. I have hashbrowns. The big bag of hashbrowns? I’ll fry them for you, extra crispy. I practiced.”

“You did not,” Nicky laughed.

“A little,” Alex protested. “You made them that time at your house for Greenie and he told me your butter secret—”

“That was three years ago,” Nicky said. “More than that. That was a long time ago, if Greenie was here and we were—” Nicky swallowed whatever was in his throat. “If you were having breakfast with me. With me at my house.”

They stared at each other until Alex reached out a hand. “Sleep more? You like sleep.”

“You should—” Nicky finally walked back to the other side of the bed and dropped his clothes back in the chair where he had dropped them the night before. He stood by the side of the bed and watched Alex turn onto his other side and face him. “There’s so much space and you were all the way over there. Just.” Nicky made the stupidest hand gestures he could manage before Alex laughed and edged a little closer.

“Like that?” Alex asked.

“No,” Nicky said. “I know you need more space than that.”

Alex edged closer, then asked, “How much space you need?”

Nicky stared back. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

He climbed back into the bed and pulled the sheets and blankets close. Alex laughed at how Nicky tugged some of the sheets from him, then came closer. They weren’t quite in the middle, nor were they quite touching. This was a hilarious game to Alex, the way he could invite someone into his bed and then let his body do everything in its power to avoid clinging to them, or even let Alex be tempted by it if he could feel the heat of them next to his skin.

Nicky reached out a socked foot and touched Alex’s shin. “Sleep well,” he said.

“That’s it?” Alex asked.

Nicky shrugged and closed his eyes as if he was going to sleep ever again. “If that’s all you want.”

There was a heavy hand on his bicep, fingers curling there then traveling up to Nicky’s shoulder. Alex tugged at him and Nicky shifted a little, then a little more, until they were nearly chest to chest, the heat from each other palpable even if they weren’t pressed against each other.

“This,” Alex said, “And hashbrowns, too,” the most absurd promise anyone had ever made to anyone else, and certainly the only promise anyone had ever made to Nicky.

“Okay,” Nicky sighed.

*

Nicky couldn’t figure out if the team had stopped freezing out him and Alex for their infinite layers of betrayal.

The alternative was that every time he wanted to murder them all over again and move to a remote cabin on a frozen lake somewhere, Alex would walk by and touch a strand of Nicky’s hair, pushing it over his ear, just where Nicky wanted it.

The first few times it happened in the dressing room or as they took their seats to watch tape, Nicky’s head turned like an owl’s so he could watch Alex go to his seat. Alex walked like he hadn’t done anything to Nicky, like everyone hadn’t seen him do it.

Was that how he did it in Moscow? Nicky had seen author portraits of Alex’s friend, the love of his life, the poet, the writer—thick black curly hair, a nose like Alex’s but unbroken, eyes pleading for whatever book prize they gave out now for hacks writing about how sad it was to be alive, like a beating heart and blades on new crisp ice weren’t enough to make it all worth it. Was that how Alex told his friend that he loved him without ever saying the words, breaking their code? A curl over the ear, a glance that lingered over a meal, a kiss on the cheek?

“Backy, what did I just say?” asked Trotz.

Nicky returned a withering glare; he had outstayed enough doctors and staff and coaches and building name changes that Trotz knew he wouldn’t get an answer; instead Trotz said, “All of you, pay attention,” and then repeated whatever he said.

Nicky looked across the room again. Alex was watching him. Their eyes meeting across a room of their disgusting teammates, it was so little to anyone, it was practically nothing, and yet.

Nicky turned back to the screen and kept it close, the heat of Alex’s eyes on his skin.

*

Alex instituted date nights.

He didn’t call them date nights; he only texted Nicky once every other week or so with _date???? )))))))))))))))_ and a location, and Nicky would go. Sometimes he would go over to Alex’s house because the text was accompanied by a spread of pizza with the horrible toppings Nicky loved and everyone else hated (toppings that he loved because it meant no one else would want to share a pizza with him, so he would get a whole pizza for himself). Sometimes Alex would text a link to a restaurant that delivered and he would arrive at Nicky’s with a too-fancy wine that would leave them sitting together, warm on the couch, half-dozing through Netflix’s most relaxing true crime documentaries, or something where bears ate things or sharks were going to re-conquer the oceans when the sea levels destroyed humanity’s infrastructures.

Alex had the same routine on the road, except Nicky would either go to Alex’s room or text back _no i just got the bed warm you come here_ and Alex would come to Nicky’s room and they would have a fucking date night. They would watch the local news and marvel at how North Americans loved to hear only three categories of news from their local affiliates: fires, memes, and murders. They would order room service and call up for extra condiments because somehow six pounds of cheese on one quesadilla did nothing to actually flavor the greasy mess Nicky was shoveling into his mouth. They would lie together in a king size bed that had just enough space for their long legs and broad shoulders, and Nicky would flick off his light and nod off first, Alex’s warmth all along his side.

Their team assumed these were, literally, fucking dates. Even if Nicky and Alex had come clean about the depth of their lies to the team, some of them still looked at the two of them as though _the lie_ was a lie. Nicky knew from his own experience that some of their teammates believed they were retreating to each other’s rooms for the quietest fucking ever, soundtracked by a local movie station playing a Hobbit movie with as many commercials as legally allowed.

(Andre would say things the next morning like, “You look well-rested,” and Nicky would stare at him until Andre looked down at his breakfast and devoured it like his life depended on it—which it did.)

When they had date nights in Washington, they would stay over for the night and sleep in each other’s beds. Nicky still woke up those mornings after, baffled that there was a man in bed with him. There was a man that stayed all night, and sometimes he was awake watching Nicky before his eyes closed again. His eyelashes were so long and so stupidly graceful. He was so soft in Nicky’s bed that it was difficult for Nicky to sleep, finally knowing what he was missing.

But sometimes Nicky shut his eyes, too, and dozed off again. The bed was warm and when he woke up, it might be five years earlier and they might be in Moscow. Alex always woke early in Russia. He would wake up crowing around the apartment they shared and then knock on Nicky’s bedroom door until he could come in and jump into Nicky’s bed, urging him out so they could go to practice. They could practice Nicky’s Russian and Russian trash talk, and work with their team on translating the best Swedish insults into perfect Russian insults. They could play hockey together, because Alex had asked him to come to Moscow and Nicky had come.

If Nicky shut his eyes and woke up five years earlier, in Moscow, and Alex bounded into his room and jumped into bed to wake him up, maybe that would be the morning that Nicky would let Alex wrestle him into bed, hands tight on his arms and pinning him into the mattress. Maybe Nicky would lift his chin and Alex would lean down and they would kiss, when they were twenty-five and twenty-seven in Moscow, and they would have it all. They would have everything exactly when they wanted it: hockey and money and a bed and condoms and food and each other’s mouths, hungry for each other.

Nicky woke up, the morning after one of their date nights. It was five years after Moscow, but Alex was still there.

“Good morning,” Nicky said.

“Good morning.”

Nicky yawned and stretched and hid his face in the sheets and pillows with fake drowsiness while Alex laughed at him and dug around the nightstand for his phone. Nicky of five years ago, Nicky who loved Alex and would have told him, would have kissed him—that Nicky had so much love and so little else. That Nicky would have devoured Alex alive with the way he starved for attention and accolades; he would have lost Alex with how much he couldn’t live without him.

It was five years later, ten years since Nicky had come to America. They had stayed alive that long—maybe now they could finally live.

Nicky reached out for Alex and found himself pulled into a tight hug against Alex’s chest. He loosened his grip and Nicky edged away a little, but he left his head on Alex’s shoulder. Alex was warm and quiet, occasionally muttering obscenities at whatever he was reading on the internet. Nicky felt himself dozing again and this time, he would wake up exactly where he was, exactly when he wanted to be there.

*

Nicky hated his phone and hated texting, but that didn’t stop every person in his life from adding him to as many group chats as they thought he should belong to, such as: the current Caps; #CapsDads (him, Alex, Carly, Holtz, Osh, Beags, Orpik—actual dads and team dads); a one-on-one window where Greenie sent him highly stylized photos of his life in Detroit and more selfies than Nicky knew what to do with, besides pine helplessly for emotional stability and well-defined eyebrows; a horrifying advice group between him, Andre, and Jojo where he and Jojo did their best to help Andre make good decisions; and the Tre Kronor group chat.

The Tre Kronor window was titled with three crown emojis and featured a monthly topic, such as:

 

 **NOVEMBER:** BACKIS BREAKS BONDS / WHO WILL LOVE OUR NYLETT NOW

 **DECEMBER:** XMAS PARTY IN NYC / OVI’S SWEDISH NICKNAME CONTEST

 **JANUARY:** WORLDS 2021 FANTASY ROSTER / NYLETT PLEASE DATE KUCHEROV

 **FEBRUARY:** SHIRTLESS CHEF GABE’S BEST ROMANTIC FISH RECIPES

 **MARCH:** NICKE IS YOUR HUSBAND COMING TO SUMMER CAMP WITH US PLEASE SAY YES

 **APRIL:** ERIK PAY YOUR SHARE FOR NICKE’S WEDDING PRESENT YOU SHIT

 

(Nicky had settled the Swedish nickname contest with a very firm, “Call him Ovi or I will eat you,” and that had been the end of it.

(The end of it via text, anyway.)

One by one the Swedes in the Tre Kronor chat dropped off the NHL playoff radar and taunted the others with their vacations home before they met up in Denmark for Worlds. The Caps were in the first round, a given nearly every year Nicky had been in America, but that didn’t stop the Swedes training for Worlds from planning an elaborate feast in Copenhagen to celebrate Nicky’s engagement and upcoming marriage.

No one in the chat had the balls to ask what Elias (Lindholm) asked when the Caps arrived in Raleigh to start their first round matchup against the Canes.

“Are you, though,” Elias asked over drinks with Nicky, Andre, and the other Swedes on the Canes. “Are you getting married this summer, like you said? You never talk about it.”

“No one’s business,” Nicky said to his beer.

“Not the reporters’ business, but what about your friends?”

It wasn’t that Nicky didn’t think of them as friends. The Tre Kronor group were, maybe, the closest people Nicky had to friends that weren’t also co-workers, though even that was a fucking stretch when one considered the industry they were in, and that most of them might be working together in a championship hockey tournament together in two or three weeks’ time. (Or not at all, Nicky hoped.) Yes, Nicky and Alex had to keep their plans under wraps to maintain their privacy and ensure that nothing undermined what they were doing, but—

But they had planned a wedding, a wedding with only Nicky’s family and Alex’s brother but without friends. Was that a wedding Nicky wanted to have? Was that the life Nicky wanted to start?

“We’re getting married,” Nicky said. Andre looked over, shocked, because he had no poker face and because Nicky had honestly not spoken about their wedding to anyone who wasn’t a lawyer in charge of some aspect of their lives.

“We’ve done all the paperwork—prenup, wills, everything, we just need to file for our license and… get married.”

“Can we come?” Andre asked.

Nicky chewed on his lips and made a sound somewhere in his throat. “I need to talk to Alex. We wanted to keep it small and private, but. I don’t know. It feels lonely, now, a wedding without friends.”

“It was what Alex wanted all those months ago,” Andre added as he looked across the table at Elias. “He wanted to get married by a lake with Nicky. When they were really old, like _fifty_.”

“Shut up,” Nicky hissed.

“You can still do that,” Elias said. “And also have your thirty very respectful friends cheering for both of you and welcoming your husband to Sweden.” Elias shook his head. “Ovi the Swede. I can’t believe that’s happening.”

“I know,” Nicky said, and then he laughed suddenly. “I know! What the _fuck_.”

Nicky and Andre didn’t stay for dinner; their team still had ridiculous ideas about socializing too much with the other team during the playoffs and Nicky was glad to have an excuse to drag Andre back to their hotel. The walk back from the bar was maybe the longest Andre had allowed himself to be alone in Nicky’s company since everything with Alex had come out.

“So you approve?” Nicky asked as they walked. “Of me and Ovi?”

“Do you care? Do you care what any of us think?”

Nicky took too long to answer that.

“You seem more friendly now,” Andre said. “Maybe it’s because we were all mad at you, but you seem like friends now. Carly says it’s like before, when you were friends. Why did you stop?”

“Carly said that?”

“He said a long time ago, you two were everything to the team, and then you stopped. He thought it was because you guys were getting old and we new guys came and we were all young, so you wanted to be responsible and shit and not be Nicky-and-Ovi anymore.”

“It was that, a little,” Nicky said. “I didn’t think anyone noticed. I didn’t care if anyone noticed.”

“Did you hate him?”

Nicky cleared his throat, then nodded. “A little. You do that. When you—you love someone and they can’t love you back.”

“But you said it was—”

“I know what I said,” Nicky said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I keep lying. I can’t help it. If I told you the truth, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“What? That you and Ovi are in love? I believe it. That’s the truth now, isn’t it? Or are you just friends? Because when you’re friends, friends for real, it looks like love.” Andre shook his head. “Not that I know. I don’t know. I’m never gonna meet anyone. Maybe I don’t want anyone. I can’t imagine someone I want forever.”

“I don’t think you can imagine them until you meet them,” Nicky said. “I didn’t. One day I was watching TV while Alexander Ovechkin scored a hat trick in his first game at Worlds, and then he’s giving me a Washington jersey at the NHL draft. I couldn’t write that. I couldn’t dream that. You don’t know what’s waiting for you.”

They walked in silence for a while longer. It was still so hard for Nicky to talk about this, about Alex, about his life outside of hockey. Sweden wasn’t like Russia, but men were still men. It was clear from the beginning that if Nicky was smart, he would keep his mouth shut, not just about who he wanted to fuck but about everything. If he was quiet, he was thoughtful; if he never talked about his conquests, he was respectful. He was good enough at hockey that it glossed over a life Nicky refused to live.

What if Nicky had met a man, and loved him, and couldn’t stop himself from saying _yeah, we’re going on vacation together_ , or _we went out to dinner the other night, this nice place_ —

To let any of that slip out of his grasp would be to lose control of everything. Even now, it was hard to loosen his grip and let himself breathe, even with Andre. Andre was his friend, his rookie, he looked up to him and loved him and thought the world of him, _and still_. Nicky would choke this friendship to death rather than let Andre know he was happy.

“I’m going to talk to Alex,” Nicky said to Andre. “About inviting Tre Kronor to the wedding. We think we’ll do it late June: after Worlds, after the playoffs. I’ll tell you, okay? You and Jojo.”

“What about the boys?”

“We’ll see,” Nicky said.

Andre wanted to say something else, but Nicky stopped walking and pulled Andre to a stop. He put a hand on Andre’s elbow and fixed him with a look. “You understand, don’t you? You understand that the boys love us, but most of them won’t come to our wedding.”

“But they—”

“The Russians won’t,” Nicky said. “Osh won’t. Maybe not even Tom. He has an image, he can’t come to a wedding with men.”

Andre’s eyes dropped to the ground, down at their shoes and the sidewalk. A part of Nicky wanted to rage at Andre, at how young and spoiled and stupid he was, how _straight_ he was, that the idea Nicky would lose his friends over marrying a man was completely new to him—no, not new, but plausible, _real_. That it wasn’t real to Andre until Nicky stopped them here and named names, tore the scales from his eyes to see the reality of their situation, his and Alex’s.

“Tom would come,” Andre finally said. “He loves Mike. He wants Mike to be happy. He wants Mike to find a boyfriend. He loves you and Ovi. Why wouldn’t he want that for you?”

“Because Mike doesn’t have to get married,” Nicky said. “Mike’s gonna find a guy and post on Instagram about his new roommate and everything they do together, but Tom doesn’t have to go to his wedding. Alex and I _have_ to get married in front of the whole world. Tom won’t come to that. It’ll make him look bad, so we won’t ask him, okay?”

“You have to ask him,” Andre protested.

“I won’t,” Nicky said. “Then Tom doesn’t have to say no and we don’t have to feel bad.”

“It’s your wedding,” Andre said. “But I think you’re wrong.”

Nicky wanted to agree with him. He wanted to tell Andre that he hoped he was wrong and Tom and the boys would love to come to his and Alex’s wedding, but Andre shook him off and hustled back to the hotel. It would have hurt Nicky’s feelings if he hadn’t already broken those bones long ago.

*

It had been such a season, such a _year_ , that when they fell to Jojo and the Devils in the second round, Nicky felt relief.

Yes, soul-crushing disappointment that for yet another year, he and Alex had failed to carry their team past the second round, but now it was over. _It was over_. They even lost at home, so they could go home that night. Nicky could go home that night and sleep.

After the handshake lines and the interviews and the talks from management in the locker room, they were finally allowed to strip and head into the shower. Nicky had almost finished peeling off every disgusting layer when Alex stopped in front of his stall, dressed in his usual post-game towels, one slung low around his hips and one draped around his shoulders.

“Shower quick, okay?” Alex said, in Russian. “Then we go home.”

Nicky sat in his stall, looking up at Alex, still as a corpse as his exhausted brain tried to process what Alex said. Alex was speaking Russian to him. Alex was saying they could go home.

“Nicky, you hear me?” Alex asked, this time in English. Now he reached for Nicky, tucking his finger under Nicky’s chin and lifting it a little higher. “You want to go home soon?”

“Yes,” Nicky said, before he repeated himself. “Yes, let’s go.”

Alex nodded and dropped his hand from Nicky’s chin. He smiled at him and then left for the showers. Nicky watched him, then snapped out of it when he realized Andre was watching him.

Lots of the guys were watching him, but Andre was the one who asked, in Swedish, “You guys—you’re going home together?”

Nicky stood up and tightened the towel around his waist. “Yeah. Go on, go shower. You want a ride to your place? We can give you one.”

Nicky didn’t wait for Andre’s answer; he would hear it later, either when Andre said yes or when Andre had come up with an excuse not to be seen with them. Either one would be all right; Nicky was going home.


	4. Chapter 4

Nicky woke up alone in Alex’s bed, but it was the smell of breakfast that woke him, coffee and bacon and the buttery potatoes Nicky hoped would kill him before hockey did. He pulled on socks that went up to his knees and went downstairs to Alex’s kitchen.

“Did someone die?” Nicky asked. “You’re wearing a shirt.”

“I’m cooking bacon, I’m not gonna cook bacon without a shirt,” Alex said.

“So sensitive,” Nicky sighed as he reached for a strip of bacon sitting on a plate and paper towel on the counter.

Nicky poured himself coffee and waited until the food was done to grab Alex a Coke out of the fridge. The two of them sat down to their stacked plates of breakfast and scowled at each other’s drink choices, then hid their smiles where they thought the other couldn’t see them.

“I, um,” Nicky said. “Worlds. It’s.” Nicky shoved an inadvisable amount of food in his mouth and poured coffee after it, to Alex’s silent horror. Eventually he swallowed but, strangely enough, the question didn’t get any easier to ask.

“Do you want to come watch me play at Worlds?” Nicky asked. “I’m sorry if—I waited until now to ask because I know you love playing at Worlds and—”

“You want me to come?” Alex asked. “I’ll come.”

“What?” Nicky asked. “You will?”

Alex looked away like he actually had to consider what he had just told Nicky. He wondered how often Alex did that, how many times he agreed to do something for someone and only after reflected on how it would make him feel. He wondered if he would ever really know his friend, the man he was going to marry.

“I want to see you win,” Alex said. “I didn’t get to see it last year. I watched on TV, but—no, even if I had been playing, I wouldn’t have seen your game. I want to see you win, Nicky.”

Nicky stared back at him.

“Get gold,” Alex said firmly. “And then you can try and steal that Swedish prince baby again.”

“I’m not—I didn’t!” Nicky said.

“You wanted to.”

“Did you see him?” Nicky asked. “He was a very cute prince baby.”

Alex nodded confidently. “You’ll get the prince baby this year.”

Nicky laughed and stared at his coffee, thinking about all that was happening.

“I’ll go home and pack for the summer,” Nicky said. “Worlds will end, we can move into the new house, and then in a couple of weeks… we’ll be married.” Nicky cleared his throat. “The boys—I mean the Swedish boys. Tre Kronor. They asked if they could come and I said I would ask you.”

“You want people at the wedding?” Alex asked. “You didn’t say.”

Nicky stared at his coffee for another moment, then looked at Alex. “I didn’t know. Do you—what do you think? Do you want people there?”

Alex looked at Nicky, then looked down again. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. But they don’t want to come, so I don’t want to ask.”

“I know,” Nicky said. He reached across the table and grasped Alex’s hand, linking their fingers together. “I know, Sasha.”

Alex nodded. “So. My brother, your brother, your parents, Andre and Jojo, and the Swedish men’s national ice hockey team. Sounds like a wedding.”

*

Alex kissed him after breakfast.

After they ate and drank too much caffeine and planned the rest of their summer and curated the final guest list for their wedding and laughed at Jojo’s texts (“I’M BRINGING THE CUP TO YOUR WEDDING!!! DON’T TOUCH MY PLUS ONE!!!!”), Nicky gathered his things to leave for his house and pack for the summer, and Alex would go upstairs and do the same.

“Next time I see you,” Alex laughed, his hand about to open the front door. “We go to the airport and I’ll show off my Swedish visa.”

Nicky grinned at him, wide enough that he knew his face was doing that thing where his cheeks devoured his eyes because he was too happy.

“You will,” Nicky said. “And we’ll visit my family. And we’ll see our new house.”

Alex nodded, his face suddenly soft as he looked away from Nicky.

“What? What is it?” Nicky asked.

“I think—” Alex shook his head. “Nights you’re not here, I think what I would have done without you. That night in the hotel when everyone wanted to get me a woman, and—Nicky, what would have happened to me without you?”

Nicky stared at him. Alex had never thanked him for what he did, not that Nicky expected it, not that Nicky _wanted_ thanks, not that Nicky had wanted either of them thrown into this situation in the first place. Not that Alex—of all people, loving huge-hearted Alex—deserved to have his future taken from him and chained to someone he didn’t love.

Someone he cared about, sure, Nicky could admit that much now. Alex cared about him. But Alex wanted love, he _deserved_ love, and Nicky had taken that from him. Nicky still remembered how angry Alex had been those first months they were pretending to be together, arranging their marriage—this wasn’t the same Alex, not at all. Alex wasn’t angry with him anymore.

He wasn’t angry with Alex anymore. He hadn’t been angry with him for a long time.

“I don’t know,” Nicky said. “That was why I had to do something. I’m sorry I didn’t ask you first, I—we could have done it better, made it easier, but I couldn’t think. You were so—”

Alex reached for Nicky’s face, his hands on his cheeks for one long, maddening moment of staring into each other’s eyes. Alex was searching for something and Nicky didn’t know what he could see, only that Nicky felt helpless like this, seen for everything he was and the terror that came with that.

Alex kissed him.

Nicky kissed him back.

They broke apart to breathe, Nicky’s face feverish and hot as he wrapped his arms around Alex. It was nothing like Alex’s soft kisses to his hair, his forehead, since Nicky had asked to be touched those few months ago.

Nicky whispered under his breath, “Oh, god,” then kissed Alex again. He dug his hands into Alex’s hair, moaning into Alex’s mouth as Alex pushed his hands under Nicky’s shirt, his rough hands all along Nicky’s smooth skin.

“Let me,” Nicky gasped, walking Alex backwards against one of the ridiculous pillars in the foyer. Nicky’s hand reached past Alex’s waistband to clutch his hip, his thigh pushing Alex’s legs apart, the heat of him so real and so _unreal_ that Nicky could only kiss Alex and push away any doubts that this was happening, that he wanted this—

That _they_ wanted this, as Alex moaned against Nicky’s mouth and spread his legs wider for Nicky. When Alex spilled over Nicky’s hand, his breathing heavy and his heart pounding, Nicky kissed him and rested his head on Alex’s shoulder. Nicky was shaking with every brush of fabric against him. He wondered when, exactly, this would feel like a real thing to him—not a dream or a miracle, but something like a life they could have between them.

When Alex could form words again, he kissed Nicky and looked at him, a little sly but with more than a little questioning, maybe even hope, behind his smirk. “You want me, then?”

“Yes,” Nicky said far too eagerly. He kissed Alex and hid his face against the side of Alex’s neck. “I always have. I never stopped. Even when I couldn’t have you, I still—”

“I know,” Alex said. “I know. I never stopped.”

“I’m sorry it happened like this,” Nicky said. “I’m not sorry it happened.”

“I know.” Alex rolled his shoulder a little, bumping Nicky’s head out of the crook of his neck. “You think you ever tell me to my face?”

Nicky looked up and swallowed the terror in his throat that told him to run now, while the going was good and surely couldn’t get any better.

“I want you,” Nicky said. “I love you. Will you stay with me?” Nicky hesitated, then asked the question he never wanted to ask, the fear of Alex’s answer nearly choking it out of him.

“Would you stay with me, even if you had the choice?”

“Nicky,” Alex said softly. “I had a choice. I could have said no. I could have laughed at you in that hotel, told my agent sure, find me someone.” Alex smiled again and shook his head at Nicky. “I couldn’t leave, though. Even then, I couldn’t leave you.”

Nicky rested his head against Alex’s shoulder again to let that sink into his head. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine those words and Alex’s smile and Alex’s soft gaze dissolving everything in his blood and his bones and his muscles that froze him up and stopped him from loving Alex as much as he could. It wouldn’t happen in a day, or a hockey season, or a year, but Nicky could get there. He wanted so much to get there.

“Come upstairs,” Alex said, pressing a kiss to Nicky’s hair. “Fuck packing. Packing can wait.”

Nicky let Alex lead him upstairs, the two of them a pair of hot messes that would pack absolutely fucking nothing that day.

*

Their house was about 20 minutes south of Gävle and Valbo. It was a bit more rural than Nicky would have liked, but still close enough to town that it didn’t feel like they were trapped alone in the woods.

They bought the house because there were a lot of bedrooms as well as a lake and a dock on their property, reminiscent of Alex’s house in America. They had only seen it in photos and a FaceTime tour with Nicky’s Swedish realtor, who didn’t talk much as he led them around the house like he was filming a nature special and didn’t want to ruin the ambience/sale.

Nicky and Alex explored the house together, their hands linked as they went from room to room as if they didn’t want to lose each other. They would stay with Nicky’s parents while they furnished the house, before they traveled to Denmark for Worlds. A custom-sized bed would definitely fit in their master suite, which was one of the only things they had both requested.

They walked outside to the lake, ostensibly the place where they would also have their wedding at the end of June. The lawn needed some work, a few tiles on the deck should be replaced, but the deck was absurd: large wooden beams over the built-in counters and grill so they could install covering over it for bad weather or just to keep out the sun.

“This is your room,” Alex said as he let Nicky lead him around their _outdoor entertainment space_. “Good, more room for me upstairs.”

Nicky shot him a look and gave him a kiss before he led them down to the lake that was partly theirs now. There was another house across the way, but other than that, it was a massive lake and they had all the privacy they could want.

“Nice lake,” Nicky said. “I think we can fish here.”

“Can we swim?” Alex asked. “Leeches?”

“Leeches? What?”

“In the lake. What lives in Swedish lakes?” Alex frowned. “Is something going to bite my dick off, Nicky?”

“No?” Nicky said. “I don’t know. I’ll ask or have it tested. I don’t know. It’s a lake. I swim in lakes all the time, it’s fine. Just little fish and things. Maybe one of those big Loch Ness things.”

“Oh, okay,” Alex said. “They don’t bite. Big body, tiny mouth and neck. We’re fine.”

Nicky nodded. “We’re fine,” he repeated. Alex leaned in and kissed his cheek, then wrapped him up close. It took Nicky a long moment in Alex’s arms, his head tucked against Alex’s shoulder, before he asked, “Do you like it? I know it’s not—”

“Yes,” Alex said. “Yes, I love it.”

“You think—” Nicky couldn’t get out the words, exactly, and Alex wasn’t going to do him a favor and finish his next sentence. “I think I could retire here.”

They were both quiet until Alex nodded and kissed Nicky again. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Not for a long time.”

“No, no, fifty years at least.”

“Fifty _more_ years or until we’re fifty?”

Alex shrugged. “We’ll see.”

They stood there uselessly, holding each other and staring out at this place that was theirs now. Nicky pulled Alex closer but said nothing. It was a lot to see, all at once: that they had a future together and it looked like a big house with a deck and a grill and a lake, and they could come outside every evening during the off-season and sit in some big chairs and remember the time they were married right at the edge of the water.

“Come on,” Alex said. “Your mama promised lunch.”

“Just another minute,” Nicky said. He wrapped his arms around Alex’s waist and let Alex hold him tight. “We’re going to be happy, aren’t we?”

Alex pulled away a little so he could meet Nicky’s eyes. “Nicky, I think you’re happy now.”

“Oh, shut up,” Nicky laughed. Alex laughed, too, and Nicky hid his face so Alex didn’t have to see just what a revelation that was.

Of course, then Nicky leaned up and kissed Alex.

“Yes, I am,” Nicky said. “I’m happy.”

“Good,” Alex said. “Me too.”

*

Nicky knew very well that he was Andre’s bedrock in Washington; no matter what happened on the ice, to the team, in the world, Andre always had a home and a friend with Nicky.

Nicky didn’t regret his choices, the ones he made to survive, but he did regret that he had sheltered Andre so much that Nicky’s hidden life had shaken their relationship so profoundly.

Just as Nicky thought that Andre would never come around and see Nicky the same again, or support him and Alex, he looked into the arena box in Copenhagen where he had left Alex and saw that Andre was sitting next to him, drinking a beer, laughing and letting Alex put an arm around his neck and ruffle his hair.

“What are you looking at?” William asked, his mouthguard half out of his mouth. “Oh, Burky’s there. Why do you look like someone’s just murdered your pet?”

“I didn’t think he would come,” Nicky said.

William huffed. “If he didn’t, I would have fucked him up next season.”

“Oh, I believe that,” Nicky said. “Two kittens fighting to see who could scratch the other first.”

“I’m shorter,” William said. “Sneak attack. I could take him. Is he coming to your wedding?”

“If he’s here, then I guess so.”

“I bet his gift sucks.”

Nicky pat William’s helmet and sighed. “Thank you for the support, I think.”

After the game, Alex and Andre hung out in one of the lounges of the Copenhagen arena while Nicky and the team finished their post-game interviews. Nicky found them and Andre shot up from his seat to hug Nicky, grinning at him for the first time in months.

“Ovi’s coming to camp with us this summer?” Andre asked. “With Andreas? He’s gonna _die_.”

“Make you a rich widow,” Alex agreed as he stood up and clutched Nicky’s shoulder. “You played good.”

“You’ll play that good after camp with Andreas,” Nicky laughed. “He’ll kill you and make you stronger.”

“Like the Terminator!” Andre said.

“Is that what the Terminator is?” Nicky wondered aloud, and laughed when Andre jabbed him in the side.

“Come on, take us to eat, please, I’m starving,” Andre whined.

“When are Ovi and I going to get a meal out of your contract?” Nicky asked. “It’s been a whole year. Have you even bought us a coffee?”

“Nicky, come on, the baby is visiting, he doesn’t pay,” Alex said as he led Andre out, his arm around his neck again.

Andre was flying to his parents that night, spending a few days with them before he returned to Copenhagen for the end of the tournament. The three of them still had a good, long dinner, Alex and Andre playing off each other while Nicky watched and remembered why he loved them, why they were a team, why he wanted to forgive Andre anything.

Why he _could_ forgive Andre anything.

“I talked to Tom,” Andre said. “I went with him to his parents for a little bit, so we could get out of Washington and I didn’t want to go home yet. Your text about the wedding came through.”

Nicky nodded and said nothing.

“He’s sorry, he’s busy that weekend,” Andre said. “Another wedding, someone he knew as a kid. They’re really close and he’s in the wedding, so he—he said sorry, he wanted to come—” Andre was looking down at his dessert, a decadent chocolate thing that he had been prepared to inhale until Tom’s name came up.

Alex, never deterred from food, took a fork and cut a bite for himself, eating as Andre poured his heart out. Nicky loved him.

“I know he wanted to come,” Nicky said to Andre. “I’m glad you asked him.”

“I’m not,” Andre said. “He didn’t—”

“Well,” Nicky interrupted. “I’m glad you asked me to have people at the wedding. It was going to be lonely without people there. Without you.”

That seemed to cheer up Andre again, enough to wake up his appetite and wrestle his dessert out of range from Alex’s fork. It was a scary ninety seconds where Andre seemed too sad to eat.

Alex reached under the table and found Nicky’s hand, linking their fingers together and squeezing briefly while Andre devoured his cake. Nicky met Alex’s eyes and found a smile for him as he held Alex’s hand a little firmer in his own.

“Can I stay with you guys after the wedding or are you gonna be fucking a lot?” Andre asked with a mouthful of cake. “Are you going on a honeymoon until camp? If I stay at your house, can I have people over or no? Are you going on a trip? Where are you going? Is it somewhere cool? Can I come with you and stay somewhere else? Is it one of those island places where you have a private beach and it’s a different day all the time?”

“Do I look like a travel agent to you?” Nicky asked.

“What the fuck is a travel agent?”

*

Sweden won gold again at Worlds and William managed _not_ to break a Lundqvist celebrating. Nicky didn’t have to take part in a goddamn shootout, either, because they managed to win in regulation and—

And they were playing Russia in the gold medal game, and it took everything in Nicky’s power to completely shut out the arena box where Alex and Andre and Nicky’s family were sitting, and to ignore the heartbroken scowl Kuzya shot him across every faceoff.

As they shook hands at the close, Kuzya pulled him in for a one-armed hug and a quick, heavy pat on the back. He whispered, “Good game, take care, Ovi too,” and then pulled away before anyone could think they had shared words. Orlov nodded at him, shook his hand, and moved to the next Swede. Kucherov, Panarin, his few Russian acquaintances left over from years of playing at Worlds and his half-season in Moscow, all nodded at him with some new gravity that hadn’t been there in previous years, as thought the ghost of Alex were hanging behind him. He couldn’t look, not yet.

It felt like hours before Nicky and William managed to escape with their medals to see their families, once they had showered and dodged another shower of champagne as they wound their way through the arena.

Laughing hysterically, they turned a corner to the usual corridor of VIP lounges and there was Alex in his blue game day suit, hands in his pockets, laughing with Nicky’s father. It took Nicky’s breath away, a little, the way he could always spot Alex from far away, the way his body was always the most striking one in a crowd.

“LISTEN, YOU,” William shouted, already drunk on however much champagne he had managed to inhale as it was poured into his face. “LISTEN. _OVECHKIN_. You. You’re listening to me!”

Alex made the most perfect face as he looked over William’s head at Nicky, wide-eyed and about to laugh right in William’s face. He managed to compose himself and take William by the arms, holding him in place and looking at him very seriously.

“That’s right, you stay when I talk to you,” William said. “Now. Listen. SEE THIS.” He pushed the gold medal around his neck in Alex’s face. “Your husband has _three_ of them now, and when I go to your house, there better be a big room of medals and trophies, and they better all be there, right next to yours, and they better be—they’re gonna be the _best medals_ , and you’re going to—to fucking polish them and look at them all the time and know how good they are.” William nodded very seriously and pointed the medal around his neck over his shoulder towards Nicky. “He’s a GOOD MEDAL. You’re gonna take GOOD CARE of that MEDAL. And you’ll let him have a CAT. He doesn’t like dogs, he likes big slow soft cats that sit in his lap and judge people, and maybe if you find a dog that’s nice and doesn’t jump on people, then maybe you can get a dog, but—” William was twenty-two and exhausted and wasted so, as drunk twenty-two year olds were sometimes wont to do, he started crying. “You don’t know how lucky you are to win this big stupid medal. And you’ll make him wear his retainer at night so his big ugly teeth don’t come back.”

“Can I put this on instagram?” Andre asked from behind his phone.

“Absolutely not,” Alex said as he pulled William into an enormous hug. “This was the best present you could give me and Nicky ever, ever, and we’ll be sure to play it at your wedding, too.”

“Can we go eat cheeseburgers before we go to the party?” William asked. “I’m so hungry.”

Nicky had laughed through William’s punch-drunk speech and he laughed even harder now as William let himself sag into Alex’s arms. Alex looked over his head again at Nicky and they couldn’t help laughing again, despite William’s quiet protests that they weren’t taking him seriously and this didn’t _feel_ like a car taking him to a McDonald’s.

Alex handed William over to Andre so he and Nicky could go and collect whatever personal things they had left in the locker room. As they walked back to the room, Nicky started laughing again and took Alex’s hand, bumping into him as they walked because—just because.

“You have a little to drink, too?” Alex asked, bumping Nicky right back.

“No,” Nicky lied. “You proud of me?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “Last time Sweden won back-to-back gold at Worlds, Kuzya was born a week later.”

“Oh god, we’re so old,” Nicky whined.

“You weren’t on that team, Nicky. You were seven.”

“Doesn’t matter, we’re so old,” Nicky repeated.

“Well, that’s true,” Alex said.

As they turned another corner, Nicky stopped them and pulled Alex in for a kiss. Alex’s hands went to Nicky’s waist and he pressed his forehead to Nicky’s.

“What was that for?” Alex asked.

“Are you telling the truth?” Nicky asked quietly. “Are you proud of me, even if you—you only watched from the box, you couldn’t be on the ice and check me and flip me into space—”

“It hurts not to be there,” Alex admitted. “But I’m proud of you. You win, I win. You lose, I lose. I’m always proud of you.”

Nicky nodded, then leaned up and kissed Alex again, his arms wrapping around Alex’s neck. It was stupid and careless to kiss like this where anyone could see them, or anyone with a phone could catch them; it was also warm and safe and perfect in Alex’s arms, and Nicky could do this, just this once, the night he won gold.

*

The morning of their wedding, Alex stood in front of Kris, Nicky’s brother, and tied his bowtie perfectly while a photographer quietly clicked away a thousand times. Nicky was taking care of Andre’s tie because apparently Tom did his ties for him before black tie events in Washington.

There was a commotion downstairs that sounded like Erik Karlsson discovering the stash of liquor that had been gifted to them and subsequently being ushered back out onto deck by the host of Nylanders that had descended on their house.

Alex glanced over his shoulder at Nicky. “As long as he didn’t break into the reception stash.”

“No, we’re paying for that,” Nicky said. “He knows better. He’s harmless, like a big raccoon.”

Alex finished off Kris’s tie and then found himself in a huge embrace from his new brother. Nicky looked away so Kris could bless or threaten Alex however he liked, and finished Andre’s tie. “There. Send some other incompetent fashion disaster in here if they’ve never seen a bowtie before.”

“William was going to just wear his shirt unbuttoned, no tie,” Andre said. “I can pull that off.”

“You can’t,” Nicky said. “Go outside.”

Nicky’s father was sitting in an armchair that looked out onto the balcony of their master suite. He already had a beer in his hand, one of the classy wedding beers that didn’t bother Nicky too much to find one of his parents drinking on his wedding day.

“I knew there had to be a reason it took you so long to marry,” his father laughed.

“Is it the bisexual thing,” Nicky asked dryly.

“No, it’s raising hundreds of sons in Washington all these years,” his father said. “Please, Nicklas. Who _isn’t_ bisexual?”

Nicky tried to smile and glare at the same time before he answered, “Literally everyone in my life,” before he turned to Alex and smiled. “Can we be married now? So I can eat and we can throw everyone out?”

“So romantic,” Alex said. “You’re worth the wait.”

Nicky took Alex’s hand as they led the way through the house, all of them gathering on the ground floor at the doors to the deck. Nicky nudged Alex’s side, right at the inner pocket of his suit where his phone kept vibrating. “Is that your other husband?” Nicky asked. “Now’s the time to run, if that’s what you want.”

Alex gave him the flattest of unimpressed looks as he pulled out his phone. “Mystery numbers all wishing me good luck,” he said as he showed Nicky. “No Russian numbers, all Russian messages.” Alex put the phone on silent, for real, and tucked it back into his suit. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Nicky said.

“Don’t walk into the lake.”

“It’s my wedding, I’ll walk into the lake if I want to.”

“You never had it tested.”

“I was busy.”

“You weren’t kidnapping the prince baby so I don’t know what you were busy doing.”

Nicky’s mother approached them and honest to god _shushed_ them at their own wedding procession. “Come now. Let’s walk. You can bitch later.”

“Like we ever stopped,” Nicky said.

“ _I know_ ,” Kris said.

Nicky sighed deeply and leaned up to kiss Alex. “Okay, let’s get married, I suppose.”

“Nicklas!” his mother said. “You couldn’t wait twenty minutes to kiss him?”

“No,” Nicky said. He lifted his chin a little and took Alex’s hand, because they were going to process out of their house together to their lake where some official was waiting, and they were going to be married, and they were going to live their life together from this day forward.

He looked at Alex and grinned at him; Alex grinned back, his crooked face and the gap in his teeth crushingly beautiful to Nicky in the moment.

“I’m not waiting anymore.”

**Author's Note:**

> [twitter](https://twitter.com/screamlet) | [tumblr](http://screamlet.tumblr.com/post/183522420911/fic-did-you-ever-stop-to-love-me)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Did you ever stop to love me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20804834) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)




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